Some stocking fillers

With Christmas coming up, I feel I should suggest a few presents. Christmas Eve is the perfect time for weird tales, and they don't come any better than John Whitbourn's Binscombe Tales -- the perfect blend of eeriness, wit, charm and chills. But don't overlook the same author's novel Babylondon, which I sometimes categorize as Doctor Who meets A Matter of Life & Death:

"1780, The Gordon Riots: London is on fire and in the hands of the mob. Babylon rises from the Infernal depths to replace England’s capital and rule forever. Enter the enigmatic Cavaliere, sent to sort things out, armed only with a swordstick—and frightfully good manners."

Also recommended is his short story collection Altered Englands, "where traditional ghost stories rub shoulders with alternate histories, science fiction, fantasy, and tales of the supernatural. Expect blood to be chilled, pulses to quicken, and wry smiles to be raised. Includes the concluding—and revelatory—story from the Binscombe Tales series, ‘England Expects!’"

John Whitbourn doesn't only write for grown-ups. Like many authors, he has shared the tales he told to his own children. Look for Amy-Faith & the Stronghold and Amy-Faith & the Enemy of Calm.

Also imbued with the magic we expect of the season is Roz Morris's delightful short novel Lifeform Three, in which a robot and an animal together remind the humans of the future what really matters in life. Roz also wrote a charming and quirky travel memoir, Not Quite Lost, in which the Morrises explore odd corners of the UK; think Bill Bryson with more focus on the lives and eccentricities of the people met. Of course, I'm not impartial.

Another timeless classic guaranteed to bring thrills and laughs: Jamie Thomson's Dark Lord novels. Supposedly for kids but loved just as much by grown-ups, the series makes ideal reading for Christmas.

If you're not into fiction, regular readers will remember that I have previously praised Andy Fletcher's memoir-cum-life-guide How To Back Horses & Yourself. As I put it in my Amazon review, reading it is like going for a pint with somebody who is expert in their subject and is also a dazzling raconteur who can be funny and insightful while telling you all the ins and outs of their subject.

There's nothing Christmassy about Fights in Tight Spaces, but it is a fun little game that Jamie and I have been enjoying recently, and if you're too lazy to do any shopping it has the advantage that you can just download it. It reminds me a little of the classic boardgame Gunslinger, given that your tactical moves are played in the form of cards with an action point cost (though in Gunslinger you choose the round's cards rather than having them dealt randomly and most cards can be played in more than one way). The developer is currently polishing a follow-up called Knights in Tight Spaces, which I can see myself losing many hours to.

Or what about a gamebook? Some of the best available are Martin Noutch's Steam Highwayman series, rich with enough period atmosphere, innovative fantasy, exhilarating adventure, and vivid characters to draw comparison with Dickens. Playing these is like diving into your own Christmas Day movie.

Possibly the ultimate in depth of both setting and gameplay is Expeditionary Company. This series is complex but rewards the care and attention you'll put into every detail, even down to the NPC guards you'll pick to defend your caravans: some of the NPCs are arrogant and hard to get along with but consummate fighters, others have valuable skills like healing, survival, tracking and trading. There's a huge range of downloadable extras you can find here. What would be even more perfect to turn Expeditionary Company into a Christmas gift would be if there was a boardgame adaptation (maybe a Kickstarter for 2025 there?) but with a little imagination you'll find the gamebooks are all you'll need to carry you off into a whole other world of fabulous adventures.

Another innovative gamebook is In the Ashes by Pablo Aguilera. I say gamebook, but this really is a solo RPG with a fascinating admixture of boardgame elements. I intend to talk more about both this and Expeditionary Company when I get time to analyze them in detail, but suffice it to say that In the Ashes is a physically gorgeous artefact that would make an ideal Christmas present.

Or for something visual that's both disturbing and charming at the same time, let me recommend Ryan Lovelock's brilliant Kadath Express. Ryan has provided a free digital version (hit the link) for you to try online, but consider splashing out for the hardback because it really makes a gorgeous gift.

For roleplaying into the New Year, I like the look of Postmortem Studios' Wightchester: Prison City of the Damned. It's sort of the horror reversal of Mirabilis (see below) as the comet of 1666 causes the dead to rise from their graves. The rising is worst in England, where the dead from the plague and the recent Civil War overwhelm the city of Whitchester, which is subsequently sealed up tight and walled off, becoming Wightchester. The city is now a prison for criminals tasked with reclaiming it and facing certain death from the undead should they fail. (And for further ideas to keep the campaign going once Whitchester is purged of zombies, you could do worse than plunder the imagination of Pat Mills in his comic Defoe: 1666.)

If you're looking for books of mine (and bless you, if so) then the ones I'd most recommend for Christmas are Mirabilis: Year of Wonders volume one and volume two. And if comics are not your thing, the Edwardian fantasy of the Mirabilis universe is also on show in A Minotaur at the Savoy, a collection of quirky vignettes. Or if it's a virtual stocking you're looking to fill, try the online version of Heart of Ice generously coded by Benjamin Fox.

And for viewing on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, here are a few things I've enjoyed over the years while recovering between bouts of turkey and pudding. Wine may also have been involved.

• 101 Dalmatians
• Catch Me If You Can
• First Men in the Moon
• A Ghost Story for Christmas (especially "The Ash Tree")
• Inside Number 9 (like M R James, ideal for Christmas Eve)
• Knight & Day
• The Ladykillers
• The Lost City
• Passengers
• Robin Redbreast
• Spy
• The Stone Tape
• Survivors (1975)
• The Time Traveler's Wife
• The Woman in Black (1989)

Finally, a freebie: my pulp-era SF pastiche "Cubic Capacity". It's not specifically set at this time of year but it has got a lacing of whimsy such as readers used to find in Unknown, which seems appropriate to the season, and being free it counts as a gift. I was 15 years old when I wrote the story and I'm not sure I could do it any better today. A ghost of Christmas Past, then.

Crafting characters and stories

The current trend in indie roleplaying is to keep at least one eye on the authorial view of your character. I played in a recent game where a player used a retcon rule to ensure their character appeared in the right place in the nick of time to foil an NPC villain's master plan. Somebody on Twitter (or X if you're a member of the Musk family) was proposing that a player should get to write the monologue for the BBEG of the campaign. Even the rules of some indie RPGs are built around "satisfying character arcs" and other Hollywood-exec jargon.

It's not to my taste. I don't like retcons because they break immersion. Taking an authorial view of your PC doubly so. I prefer narratives that emerge in the moment; they're more exhilarating to play in and less trite to experience. I didn't even know what BBEG stood for till I Googled it. My campaigns rarely have anything as simplistic as a Big Bad (that's for kids' TV) and in any case they wouldn't waste time monologuing (has nobody out there seen The Incredibles?).

When Pelgrane Press got the Dying Earth licence, we talked about some Dying Earth gamebooks and I must admit I came up with an authorial approach. Paul Mason had to point out to me that the main effect of putting the player in the author's role would be to distance them emotionally from the events of the story. That might be why it's favoured in indie roleplaying, in fact; the ultimate safe space is when you don't have to commit to the character, the same way that Mystery Science Theater 3000 allowed nerds to ironically distance themselves from movies they'd be embarrassed to admit to liking.

But even if you don't play in authorial mode, it's handy to know about plotting and characterization. If you're refereeing the game you'll at least want to go in with a storyline in mind, even if it's just a safety net that you'll never use because the real story will be shaped spontaneously by the players' actions. And character-creation tips aren't only useful for designing NPCs. Players can benefit from starting with some traits and foibles, even if (as often happens) those drop away later as the character becomes more real to them.

Which is why I recommend Roz Morris's Nail Your Novel series. All right, yes, I am married to her. But I wouldn't let a little thing like that sway my opinion. I use Roz's advice when writing my own stories, both in book form and around the gaming table. You can try out her 100 tips for fascinating characters free. Let us know how you get on, and which style of roleplaying you prefer.

Festival of joy

It's like going from colour to black & white. My wife and I are back under the chill grey skies of Britain after a weekend in glorious Cannes, where we were fêted like royalty (Louis XIV, that is, not Louis XVI) by my French publishers Alkonost and the good people of Scriptarium. In the South of France, ham slices and bread bought from a Spar corner shop are as delicious as anything you'd get in a top London restaurant. What a shock to the system, then, to return to a country where cheese is sold in tubes after we'd been contentedly munching freshly baked croissants on the Croisette. But we brought back something priceless to cast a golden gleam over Britain's drab streets: memories of a warm and heartfelt welcome from all the French gamebook community, and those memories I will cherish forever.

The occasion was the Festival International des Jeux, where I was signing books alongside Jonathan Green, Emmanuel Quaireau, Gauthier Wendling, Frédéric Meurin (who took the photo below), and other talented folk. We enjoyed perhaps the best meal I'll have all year (for both the food and the company) at Le Caveau 30. I won one award (for the French edition of Down Among the Dead Men) and handed out several others, was interviewed, chatted to fans and fellow creatives alike, and generally had the most amazing time.

The Alkonost stand sold out of copies of Notos, the second book in the Forge Divine series (Vulcanverse to English gamers). I think that may have been a divine reward for my honesty when a mother with a 9-year-old daughter came over to look at the Forge Divine books. "She loves Greek mythology," said the mother; "should I get her this?" Remembering what it's like to be a 9-year-old otaku, and what purists the young are, I had to put my hand on my heart and say she would prefer Cyclades, Emmanuel Quaireau's gamebook, because that is set in mythological Greece whereas the Vulcanverse books are slightly Graeco-Roman flavoured fantasy, but mostly their own thing. The little girl went home happily clutching Cyclades, and the Fates took note and later ensured we sold the last copy of Notos fifteen minutes before it was time to pack up.

I just wish my French were better, as there's obviously a lot of really original work going on in the gamebook field nowadays. A couple of examples:

The Mini-Yaz silver medal went to Froides Lattitudes by Henry Pichat, set in the Arctic Ocean at the end of the 19th century. The blurb explains: "You are the leader of a polar expedition setting out in search of the Northwest Passage, but the boat you command is quickly caught in the ice. After two winters on a drifting ice floe, you have no choice but to abandon the ship and try to bring your crew back to inhabited lands. A thousand kilometers separate you from civilization. Will you be able to reach it? And at what cost?"

The Mini-Yaz gold medal was won by Adrien Saurat with his book Traité sur l'expérience divinatoire à propos du vampyre surnommé Le Valèque. The book is supposed to have been written in the 18th century and is formulated as a gamebook, except that the purpose is not (for the fictional author) playful but divinatory. He proposes possible paths that we will follow with our intuition and with the help of certain dice rolls (influenced by a superior force if we pray briefly at each new passage). This process is supposed to help us find the true thread of events relating to a troubled episode that a village experienced a long time ago, and whose testimonies, decades later, vary greatly.

Both sound superb and worthy winners, and hopefully somebody will get around to translating them into English soon. I'll be first in line to read them.

Pirates ahoy

There's a lot of talk about generative AI hallucinating, but what kind of hallucination has to happen in a human brain for them to think it's right to take someone else's work, slap their own name on it, and put it up for sale (aye, and here's the rub) at more than the price of the genuine article?

The question isn't purely rhetorical. While creating links for the Fabled Lands bookstores (US here, UK here) I came across some of my own gamebooks on sale on Apple Books under different titles. Well, nearly different -- whoever pirated them was dumb enough to leave "Critical IF" in the name, which is why they popped up on a Google search.

As you can see, one rip-off edition wasn't enough for them. And that time could have been so much better spent teaching themselves English. And, I dunno, ethics. Others have pointed out that they've also ripped off images owned by some big hitters, who might well come gunning for them with more than a rusty cannon. Happily, Apple's legal department has now deleted the books, though I suspect the same piratical individuals will just upload them again under new titles.

If you think all that is bad (and I hope you do) you should hear what happened to my wife. A company offering online courses ripped off the entire contents of her Nail Your Novel books and spent years selling "their" writing course for considerably more than the cost of the books. She only found out about it because the company had lazily cut-&-pasted everything from the books including a mention of her name, enabling one of their customers to track her down to ask if she'd be doing any more courses. (In fact she does have a bona fide online course, Become a Ghost-Writer.) She found a lawyer, but after months of effort all she got was a desultory payout -- a fraction of the money the company had made off the back of her work. Sadly, often crime does pay.

Anyway, on the principle that one has to rise above such knavery, I'll just point out that you can get the most up-to-date editions of the Critical IF books for less money from legitimate sources. Don't let the hornswogglers win!

Critical IF e-books are available on Amazon US and Amazon UK from $0.99 to $2.99.

Face it

When I'm writing a scenario for publication (such as this one) I'll sometimes cast the incidental NPC roles by saying which actor might play them. It's a shorthand way of conveying the idea of the character without having to describe their personality in the scenario.

My wife goes one further. When writing her novels she picks real faces that she can visualize as the characters. That could work when designing roleplaying scenarios too.

And a further evolution: Unreal Person lets you generate faces that don't exist. (The one above on the right really shouldn't.) Or you can use something like Nightcafe for non-modern images like this medieval apothecary:

You do have to let the art lead you where it will, though. There's not yet much hope of getting the AI to draw exactly what you want, as my experiments on the Mirabilis blog show. Still, the field of generative AI has reached escape velocity now. It's only a matter of time.

A supernova imagination

You can probably see why I was immediately drawn to the work of Dublin-based artist Rory Björkman. There's a bit of a Mirabilis vibe in some of his pictures. But he has more strings to his bow that that, and I was mesmerized by this article about his art. (Full disclosure: it's by my wife.)

"Rory sees a lot of potential in games. 'I think they’re an underused platform. They could be used to a much greater extent for telling stories instead of shoot-up adventures. Games could tell great stories but you don’t see much of that.’"

He's talking about videogames, of course, but I think that any one of Rory's images could inspire an entire roleplaying scenario. If you try one out, come back and let us know how it went.

A visit to the real Legend

“It has become something of a dare for the children of Banlet to walk widdershins around the tomb thirteen times before inserting a finger into the keyhole of the wooden door. The challenge being to leave their finger in for the longest time at risk of the dead man gnawing at the tip.”

What’s the difference between Dungeons & Dragons and Dragon Warriors? No doubt whatever curve we draw around the two there will be outliers, but on the whole D&D seems to like world-shattering plots that, if you put them on screen, would involve a couple of hundred CGI experts. Dragon Warriors is much closer to ‘the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush,’ as one of our greatest novelists put it.

In one of our recent campaigns designed for playtesting the Jewelspider rules, Oliver Johnson ran a scenario in which we were able to give a cow to a farmer who had had his livelihood destroyed by rustlers. There was also a plot about finding a bottle of ‘the perfume of Heaven’ to deal with a prophecy about the end of the world, but I can’t even remember that. Real emotion is saving a few people you’ve actually met, not the millions you haven't. That’s why The Seventh Seal is still one of the best Dragon Warriors films.

In a typical D&D campaign, that perfume of Heaven would be a magic item – in effect a bit of tech – to be used as part of a CRPG-style solution, ie matching the item to the problem. In Dragon Warriors it matters that it’s holy. The cultural and theological aspects far outweigh the practical. You won’t catch Legend players saying something like, ‘Give the perfume of Heaven to the warlock because he stands at the back, so he can throw it on the monster while we hold it off.’ You wouldn’t think of a relic as a tool to help you in a fight. You wouldn’t think of tactics as something that trumps the social order. For that matter you wouldn’t even voluntarily associate with a known warlock.

But, of course, he or she may not know they’re a warlock. That’s why I particularly like Nigel Ward’s adventure of two monks in the new Red Ruin chapbook. These two fellows are not the usual cosplayers who inhabit many fantasy campaigns. They are thoroughly part of their world and they perceive everything, including their own abilities, in that light. The adventure is also a perfect example of why Miss Austen was right about the two inches of ivory, and why Michael Fane in Compton Mackenzie’s Sinister Street has a far more magical, marvellous and heart-stoppingly menacing childhood than J K Rowling was able to dream up for Harry Potter. Less is more, and “The Wickedest Man in Banlet” delivers in shudders, thrills and authentic triumph in a way that no we’re-off-to-save-the-world-again epic ever could.

You can pick up The Adventures of Cedric & Fulk free here with several of the best Legend scenarios you'll get at that or any price this year.

Other news. Here’s an interview with Joël Mallet, who has been translating the Fabled Lands books into French for Alkonost. Segueing from that, Alkonost are in talks with Mark Smith to publish his Virtual Reality books Green Blood and Coils of Hate and maybe the never-seen-before Mask of Death.

On the subject of death and cemeteries, if you enjoy the creepy frisson of a visit to Sir Rickard’s graveside then take a look at Jack Cooke’s The End of the Road, in which he drives around Britain in an old hearse in search of storied tombs.

And I’d better not let a mention of books pass without adding that my wife’s new novel Ever Rest is now available for pre-order. I’ll tell you how it came about. It’s loosely based on a short story Roz wrote twenty years ago, which in turn was based on an anecdote my school’s assistant headmaster, Mr Bishop, told me fifty years ago. He was climbing in the Alps and a body was brought in that had been carried down the mountain in a glacier. The body was a little battered but still recognizably a young man. An old woman came and kissed the body, and somebody said that she had been engaged to the man fifty years earlier when he fell off the mountain. Given that Mr Bishop was in his late sixties when he told us that (he came out of retirement to help the school out) the incident probably happened in the 1930s, meaning that the man fell into the glacier in the early 1880s. So Ever Rest really has been a tale one hundred and forty years in the making. Give or take.

The art of the possible

It was a pleasure and a privilege to be invited by Ralph Lovegrove onto his Fictoplasm podcast recently. Normally the structure of an episode involves Ralph reviewing a novel and then considering how it might inspire roleplaying games. Particularly recommended: Nineteen Eighty-Four, Mythago Wood, The Tremor of Forgery, The Chronicles of Prydain, Kill the Dead, The Eclipse of the Century, Lyonesse, and Elric of Melnibone. Talking of that last one, Ralph is currently embarking on a marathon read-though of Moorcock classics, so stay tuned.

A previous guest on the Fictoplasm podcast was my wife Roz Morris so to balance things out I guess Ralph just had to ask me. Tune in here for our long discussion which takes in Brexit (鎖国), Tetsubo (鉄棒), my planned Sparta RPG (Λ), Mirabilis (☄), Frankenstein (🧠), Tirikelu (₸), and of course Jewelspider (💎🕷 or 宝石クモ, take your pick). We also talk about politics, gamebook design, the Congo, Nazis, Sagas of the Icelanders, and roleplaying in soon-to-be-sunken lands from Abraxas to Lyonesse but I've got no kanji or other symbols for those.

Jamie mentioned after listening to the podcast that I came across a bit like Tony Blair at times. Apparently he meant because of my vocal inflection rather than my politics. I suggested we might do a regular Fabled Lands podcast. (Jamie would be the Gordon Brown of the partnership, presumably.) So far I haven't been able to convince him, but maybe if there's enough demand...

The thought that breeds fear

I didn’t get to The Weirdstone of Brisingamen until my thirties, and only then because I started going out with a girl who grew up in Alderley Edge, which is the setting for that and most of Alan Garner’s stories. She had in fact lived in the house he identified as the home of the Morrigan.

“What did you think?”

“Those kids are going to suffer from PTSD. It’s traumatic enough just reading it.”

The trauma wasn't caused by Garner’s prose. That’s beautiful. It was the descriptions of narrowing lightless tunnels and wobbling planks propped across sheer drops; that’s what I thought would scar those characters for life.

Alan Garner wrote a sequel, The Moon of Gomrath, but left it nearly fifty years before completing the trilogy. If only other fantasy authors showed such restraint. What I loved about Boneland was what many fans hated. Garner didn’t give us jolly japes with elves and ginger pop, he returned to the main character to find him broken, his twin sister missing if she ever even existed at all. If you’ve played any Dragon Warriors you’ll understand why that was the sort of conclusion to the story that would really appeal to me.

Other books in a similar vein are:

• The Box of Delights by John Masefield
• The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper
• Five Children and It by E Nesbit
• The Giant Under The Snow by John Gordon
• Inkheart by Cornelia Funke
• The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe by C S Lewis
• Moon Eyes by Josephine Poole
• The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, The Moon of Gomrath and Boneland by Alan Garner
• Wolf Star by Tanith Lee

How about a role-playing game that digs under the surface of a children’s cosy fantasy epic to see what crawls out? It turns out Becky Annison has done exactly that with her game When the Dark is Gone. She discusses it in this episode of Fictoplasm with Ralph Lovegrove and explains the design principles here.

In brief: the players are adult survivors of such an adventure, uncovering their repressed memories with nudging by a therapist character who’s the nearest the game gets to a referee. Minimal set-up, raw character interaction, no dice, emergent stories… What are you waiting for?

White skin, black heart

Jamie based Lauria, the thief who can become your occasional frenemy in Fabled Lands, on my wife Roz. Actually, that's probably not quite true. Jamie likes to use the names of friends for characters in his gamebooks, and on learning that Roz is related to the Lauries of Dumfries he drew on that for inspiration. But I'm happy to report there's nothing in my wife's character to suggest a thief or Becky Sharp trickster type.

Lauria seems to have made an impression with Fabled Lands players, and I have no doubt she'll return in later books. The picture above is one of five private commissions that Russ Nicholson undertook as part of the Kickstarter for The Serpent King's Domain. I don't know for sure if it is Lauria, as the picture is simply titled "Girl Thief", but you can make up your own mind about that.

I got this copy of the picture from Russ's blog, where you can also see his spectacular image of the city of Carapace on the back of the Great Turtle. And if you're as big a fan of Russ's work as we are, you'll also want to take a look at The Writer's Map, a new book that features some of his fantastic cartography. It's the perfect Ebrontide gift for any budding wayfarers in your family.

A shared world

A couple of earlier posts told the story of how back in the early ‘80s I got together with a bunch of friends to cook up what nearly became an ongoing gamebook saga. Almost ten years later, in May 1992, some of those same people gathered to talk about devising a shared world. Present were:

• Roz Barnes, who a few months later I married
• Oliver Johnson, co-creator of Dragon Warriors and Blood Sword
• Ian Marsh, former White Dwarf editor
• Mark Smith, co-author with Jamie of The Way of the Tiger
• Jamie Thomson, who really needs no intro here

…and me, of course. We set out that evening - almost exactly 26 years ago, good grief! - to design the framework for a fantasy world so that we could write stories in a shared setting. Here are the minutes of that meeting:

THE SHARED WORLD

As we progressed it appeared we were heading for a 'realistic' setting in which mythic heroes and high fantasy could still be accommodated as far as possible.

[The first sign of a crack right there, if you ask me. What makes a fantasy setting interesting is the idiosyncratic focus of the creator. That 1% inspiration should come from one person. Others can share the 99% perspiration of turning some broad brushstrokes into a detailed picture. But the way we were doing it, we were headed towards “low fantasy with some high fantasy too”. More dog’s breakfast than gods of creativity! – DM]

We decided the first ten or so stories should be set in and around one city state which has a peculiar geographical location.

1) Religion

Some gods do exist but never obviously intervene in the lives of mere mortals. There are many other gods revered, some in the shape of historical heroes. These are not real in the sense of having power. Some are little-known cult deities worshipped by small sects.

The Empire is a theocracy, having one dominant god. The priests use this single religion as a tool to dominate all others. The God Emperor is both the secular and religious leader. The Empire attempts to proselytize, spreading its monotheistic beliefs to those on its borders before swallowing them up militarily. This is an oppressive religion, based on fear.

[I imagine I wasn’t at all averse to portraying religion as a tool of oppression, but will have been more dubious about the obvious plan to make the Empire “evil” and our city-state “good”. I didn’t come from a D&D background like some of the players, so to me that alignment approach to fantasy stinks of propaganda and I’d have been bound to subvert it in any stories I wrote for the setting. – DM]

2) Technology

There is no gunpowder and it is a pre-industrial early iron age world, which still includes some bronze age technologies.

The means of transport (reptilian? dinosaur? what about something like an ankylosaur, useful in battle because of it club tail, they could also be used as battering rams, crushing mud and wooden buildings like tanks.) is cold blooded and very sluggish unless warm. They can be ridden in a wooden mahout or a basket. It is sometimes necessary to warm them using fires to get them to 'start' in the morning. These beasts are important in battle. Because they move faster in very hot climes, yielding better communications, the Empire has enjoyed an advantage. They are never fast moving and messages are carried by runner. There are no horses.

[The idea of the principal riding beast being cold blooded, and the effect that would have on warfare, definitely came from me. I used it in my own campaign world of Medra. I didn’t see them as heavily armoured and slow – that sounds like it was borrowed from the chlen, the sole beast of burden in Tsolyanu. Not surprising, as most of us had been playing Tekumel for more than fifteen years by this point. – DM]

Ziggurats figure prominently.

[Odd – and possibly another unconscious swipe from Tekumel. Or is it just that the Bible has taught us to expect our evil empires to come with the trappings of Orientalist architecture? –DM]

Important buildings (palaces, temples, the amphitheatre where the demos meet, the trade exchange) are built of stone. Less important buildings are timber, then timber frame and adobe (not wattle-and-daub because those require horse or cow hair). Hovels and slums are simple mud brick affairs.

3) Climate

The Empire is hot, sub-tropical. It is centred just south of the tropics. The weather gets colder as you go further south.

[We reversed the globe, possibly inspired there by The Book of the New Sun or simple contrariness. The hot climate could have been another similarity with Tekumel – midsummer temperatures in Jakalla nudge 50° C – or simply because so much fantasy fiction is windswept, cold and muddy. – DM]

The city state area is warm Mediterranean in climate. The fault line, or volcanic ring of mountains, that currently contains the Empire would produce geographical quirks due to the layers of mist and molten magma lakes.

The barbarous lands could still be temperate, they are barbaric because the beasts of burden barely function there rather than because of extreme cold. But the further reaches could even be subarctic.

4) Geography

The Empire lies in the middle of the continent and is fringed by city states and perhaps some smaller kingdoms. Its southern border is the curved fault line caused by one tectonic plate slowly crashing into another. This has thrown up an arc of young, very high, and uneroded mountains. These old rocks have split and volcanic eruptions have added new peaks and mounds of ash. In addition where the crust is torn the molten magma has come to the surface, creating unusual conditions. Avalanches of snow reaching the lava have given rise to the layer of mists which hangs forever mysterious above the foothills.

Fault lines generally give rise to mountain ranges with one sharp face and the other more gently shelving to the plain. Is the sharp face of precipices facing north, hemming in the Empire?

[Oliver’s A-level in Geography will have come into play here. –DM]

In the centre of the fault line of mountains is an area where the two tectonic plates have not yet met, of much lower land. Our city state is a gap city, geographically sited to command the vital pass between the mountains.

The home city state is a trading centre acting as a conduit through the mountains from the southern lands of the barbarians and the lands of the city states to the empire.

We know of three other city states, one inside the empire, one more military minded than ours, and another port city on the nearest coast.

5) Social organization

Most cultures have slaves.

The Empire

See religion and elsewhere. The Empire would appear too powerful to be stopped by our city state but perhaps there are other potential problems on its many borders, diverting its resources.

The home city state

It is a fledgling democracy. All descendants of the original inhabitants of the city have the vote on every issue. They jealously guard their privilege as the founders of the city state. Prominent among the demos are (i) a few Patricians, heads of what were the noble families which probably still own many of the orchards and grain fields outside the city, and (ii) the Demagogues or rabble rousers. Oratory is an important skill and the styles used would be different for the two types.

[I like the potential for political tension, an idea that I suspect came from Jamie or Mark. It’s not clear whether the Demagogues – wrong word, I know – are descended from the original inhabitants, and therefore get a vote, or are agitating from the outside. No doubt that would have got worked out in the stories. –DM]

There are mercenaries for hire here and a distinct mercenary group.

As a wealthy trade centre the city state, with its advanced culture and great minds, has been a magnet for traders, craftsmen and others who have come to live there. Many of these are very rich, but are disenfranchised as only the offspring of the original inhabitants have the vote. These people who feel discriminated against under the current system might be suborned by the agents of the Empire.

How large is the population of this city state?

6) Sorcery

We agreed the incidence of magic should be fairly low so that the intrigues, military campaigns and human interaction don't become meaningless. Of course great magics might be explained away by the people.

Theomagy: Magic practiced by priests, usually in groups within temples. Particularly strong in the Empire. This magic typically takes some time to plan and execute but can be very powerful.

Philosopher mages: A few great minds casting their spells alone or teaching philosophy and sorcery together in their schools. They use the basic elements of magic. The search for a 'missing' element has become a part of their tradition. They are flexible in their approach and can use magic extemporaneously.

The barbarian races practice shamanic magic.

One of the philosopher mages thinks he is about to develop telepathy (Dave's idea).

[That notion was attributed to me but I have no idea why I thought it might prove interesting. Perhaps I meant the kind of telepathy that allows long-range communication, which certainly features as a very rare and somewhat unreliable resource in Medra. – DM]

Given the importance of the weather on the ubiquitous beasts of burden the importance of weather magic or perhaps weather prophesy would be significant.

7) The inhabitants

The inhabitants of the city states are either olive or coppery skinned.

The barbarians are white with red or light hair. The dominant race in the Empire are black. By making black people the most dominant culture we are reversing the norm.

[The people of both Tekumel and Medra are dark-skinned, so that was obviously comme il faut for our fantasy thinking at the time, and fair enough too. Those pale, red-haired barbarians were a bit of a cliché though! – DM]

There is an intelligent race of firedrakes living on the fault line in and near volcanoes. They soar on thermals above magma lakes. They are cold blooded and need heat to fly/glide and to think clearly. Away from the heat they become torpid and slow-witted. When hot they are capable of psionics. Humans don't think the firedrakes are intelligent.

[I remember Mark particularly liked this idea and was going to write a story about a human coming to realize that the firedrakes, normally encountered in their torpid state and therefore considered just animals, actually had a sophisticated civilization within the rim of the volcano. –DM]

8) History

The expanding Empire has prospered through a divide and rule foreign policy, better use of the warbeast/beast of burden, and unified religion and thought. The Empire has reached its natural borders and there is a head of pressure building up. Its expansionist economies need more subjects and slaves.

The northernmost city state, which lay inside the mountains, has been recently gobbled up by the Empire. "Look what happened to the northernmost city state,” warn the (correct) prophets of doom.

Our home city state has been recently, or is about to be, approached by the more military-minded state nearby to look to its defence and join an alliance.

The Empire is attempting to subvert the minds of the diverse people of our city state in preparation for taking it over. It will also be working to keep the city state diplomatically isolated.

* * *

As you will have realized, we never did anything else with our shared world. That was the only time we got together to discuss it. Sometimes an idea just fizzles out, and the only way you can see that is by spending a little time developing it. In this case I think there were just too many of us to create a coherent universe. Collaboration works fine in pairs (note that only a year or two after this meeting, Mark and I had devised Virtual Reality and Jamie and I came up with Fabled Lands) but with six people in the room – it’s not an ego thing, it’s just that you all want to go off in different directions and nothing gels. Or is it that groupthink distracts you from exploring those different directions? One or t'other.

Funnily enough, if the rights to do Tekumel novels had dropped into our laps, that’s what we’d all have spent the 1990s writing. Tekumel works because it’s the vision of one mind: Professor M A R Barker’s, which has then inspired others to expand upon it. Or look at how many authors can do interesting work in Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos universe, or in Mike Mignola’s Hellboy universe (a spin-off of the former, come to think of it). Or the biggest beast of all shared worlds ever, Stan Lee’s Marvel Universe.

What do you think about shared worlds? Any favourites? Or do you find that having multiple authors working in the same universe just creates a hopeless collision of styles? The earliest shared world I'm aware of is Charles Dickens's Mugby Junction, which is well worth a look:

Notes from small islands

Happy New Year! Normally I tend to focus on gamebooks and roleplaying around here, but maybe I can squeeze in some news of projects of personal interest now that we're at the tail end of the intercalary days.

I've been trying to continue my Mirabilis comic for some time now, and finally came to the conclusion that if I can't get it to the stage where it's a commercial enterprise that pays for the pencils, inks and colours, I can at least still tell the story. Having a few pages of artwork left before Leo gave up on it, some of which he was able to ink, I began serializing issue #10 ("A Truth That Wounds") on my Patreon page.

Those already-completed pages are running out fast. We'll soon get on to Leo's rough pencils, and after that I'll have to fall back on my own sketches. No joke, that, as you can see from the sample here, but at least the die-hard followers of the story (all dozen of them!) will eventually get to read it.

My main obsession for most of the year has been my new gamebook Can You Brexit? in which you play the prime minister of Britain through two years of negotiations, calamities, and backstabbing starting in March 2017. The book is about 870 sections long, it's now finished bar a final polish, and I'm hoping to get a proper publisher if my agent can find one who isn't too craven to handle it. Enemies of the people and all that. Maybe next year I'll tackle You Are Trump.

My wife Roz has published a book of travel memoirs called Not Quite Lost for which she has been doing loads of BBC interviews throughout December. Banish those mental images of climbing the Kilimanjaro slopes or drinking snakeblood cocktails in New Guinea. These are lyrical, whimsical accounts of our visits to various old follies around Britain, peppered with eccentric encounters à la Bill Bryson. I liked it, though you may not regard me as entirely impartial.

And if you want to hear what Jamie is currently up to, come back on Friday.




Meanwhile, if you're here looking for a gaming fix I got a doozy for ya: James Wallis's long-awaited story-game Alas Vegas is finally on sale. Buy it from DriveThruRPG or Indie Press Revolution. (Unfortunately it's not on Amazon, so if you want a print copy from IPR and you live outside the US, you'll end up paying about $50 in postage.) I'm not usually a big fan of "narrative" RPGs, but any and all original work by Mr Wallis is touched with genius, so I plan to give this a go at our next weekend special.

Students talk to Reason

A while back I did an interview for Exeposé, the student newspaper of Exeter University. As it deals with a couple of my main interests (comics and interactive fiction) I thought I'd reproduce it here. The picture is me dressed as Reason at my wife-to-be's "Come as a God" party a good few years ago. Why the pistol? Because you can't argue with Reason.

We notice that you studied Physics at university. How did you go from that to what you are doing now?

I’d have done an English degree too if I’d had the time. I’ve always been on that cusp between art and science, could never quite make up my mind to go for one or the other. That probably explains why I’ve ended up gravitating towards the games industry, where I can indulge my passions for storytelling, visual design, logic, physics and maths all at once.

What attracted you to graphic novels? What do they give writers and readers that traditional books don’t?

If you look at it from a practical point of view, some stories are easier to tell visually. Like if you are creating a completely new world without any real-world references – Avatar, say. If you did that as a novel you’d have to bombard the reader with great chunks of descriptive prose – ugh. At the same time, you might not want to do it as a movie because your story needs more space and depth than you can fit into two hours. Or, of course, you might not have a quarter of a billion dollars to spend.

In fact, though, I never think it through in that kind of detail. You just start working on a story and you either feel it’s right for prose or you start blocking it out in comic panels in your head. Your muse decides for you whether it’s going to be a graphic novel.

As for what graphic novels have that traditional books don’t – well, what does painting have that music doesn’t? They’re different, both equally to be cherished as modes of expression.

Do you have a favourite graphic novel? If so, why?

Wow – I wouldn’t know where to start, I read so many. I like the works of Daniel Clowes, Adrian Tomine, Alison Bechdel, Posy Simmonds, Matt Kindt, Alan Moore… A bunch of diverse comics creators who don’t have anything much in common, except that they rarely disappoint.

If I’m going to pick my desert island read it’d be Neil Gaiman’s tour-de-force run on The Sandman. That’s an opus of around 1500 pages, so if you want to dip in, start with the collections Dream Country and Fables and Reflections.

Do you think graphic novels are taken seriously enough as a form of literature?

Not in the UK, that’s for sure. Here, a graphic novel has to be freighted with literary significance for critics to get past their aversion to the medium. Like, I was looking at the Guardian yesterday and they had a full-page review of Chris Ware’s latest graphic novel. Now, I’m not disrespecting Ware’s work – he’s very talented, and I like that comics are a rich, broad tapestry with room for all kinds of story. But as Wiki says, “His works explore themes of social isolation, emotional torment and depression.” And that’s why the Guardian will review him and wouldn’t touch 300, say. UK critics don’t know how to read comics; they don’t have a cultural lineage to fit them into. So they view them with the classic cocktail of fear, loathing and fascination. And so the only graphic novels they review seriously are the ones that fit really in an illustrated literary tradition rather than being unashamedly comics.

I don’t want to get too parochial about this because all writers work internationally these days, but Britain punches way above its weight in comics. You’ve got Gaiman, Moore, Ellis, Millar, Ennis, Quitely – too many to list, and many of them among the most successful in the profession. But they’re all working mostly outside the UK because comics here are barely a cottage industry. And the problem with that is it makes it difficult to get a British voice and sensibility across in comics. Those writers and artists have all had to adapt their style to the American market to some extent.

It’s very different in France, where four out of every ten books sold are graphic novels. You can go to a bande dessinée convention and you’ve got whole families there – kids, teens, parents, all reading graphic novels. And because of that there’s a nicely diverse range of genres: thrillers, rom-com, whodunits, science fiction. It’s not all superheroes and zombies.

You often work in collaboration with other writers and artists, what do you enjoy about these collaborations and what do you find more challenging? Has there been a collaboration that has been particularly interesting for you?

Actually, the truth is that my name may be alongside somebody else’s on the cover, but I rarely collaborate that closely. I’ve worked on a lot of series where I’ve split the writing chores with partners, but we usually have a quick consultation and then get stuck into our own individual books.

Comics like Mirabilis are the exception. Those are interesting precisely because the creative collaboration is so challenging. For example, I grew up on movies and Marvel comics, so all my layouts for Mirabilis are informed by that. But the penciller, Leo Hartas, is more influenced by illustrated books and European stuff like Tintin and The Beano. So sometimes it feels like we’re coming from opposite ends of the spectrum. I go for sexy, dark, dramatic with close ups, upshots and wide angles; he goes for funny, sweet, diagrammatic with medium shots, flat/diorama staging, and so on. But that cycle of thesis, antithesis, synthesis can throw up some nice creative surprises, I think.

A lot of your work makes literature an active experience, and puts the reader in charge. What do you hope to achieve by giving the reader a central part?

Only what any writer wants – a connection. An emotional reaction. That’s why the interactivity in Frankenstein isn’t about solving the plot, it’s about the relationship you develop with Victor and his creature. The choices you make affect their degree of empathy, alienation and – most importantly – the extent to which they trust you. That affects how much of himself Victor will reveal to you, for instance. Whether it works or not is up to readers to judge, but I think there’s never been a book anything like it before – and it’s nice when an author gets to say that.

It’s true that I’m interested in ways to make story worlds that people can interact with to discover or create their own narratives. But I think videogames are a better place to do that than interactive literature. I’m just using books (book apps, that is) as a test-bed to try out some ideas first.

Do you think it is difficult to adapt such a well-established story? Has it been well received?

Very well received, especially among younger readers (I mean teen and up) who probably wouldn’t crack open a 200-year-old novel if they’re not doing an Eng Lit course. Frankenstein is one of the modern world’s defining myths, a story that everyone thinks they know but one that is rarely read in the original. I hope my version will encourage more people to take a look at it.

Now the but: it was well received for a book that was only released on iPad and iPhone. I’m working on epub3 and Kindle versions but it was a big mistake not to bring those out at the same time. Lots of people were seeing the reviews (Salon.com had a nice one, incidentally, saying “it may be the best interactive fiction yet” – though admittedly the competition is not fierce) but couldn’t read it because they had Android tablets. But, you know, I don’t get to direct the publishing strategy. Unfortunately.

The adaptation wasn’t hard because, seminal work though Frankenstein is, it’s pretty much the worst classic novel ever written. I should qualify that. Mary Shelley was eighteen years old when she wrote it, and I certainly don’t want anyone seeing my teenage scribblings. On the other hand, she revised it in her thirties and only made it stodgier – and didn’t fix some glaring plot holes. So I felt completely free to take liberties with the text in a way I wouldn’t have done with Austen or the Brontës, say.

The end result is that my version is much more modern. There’s a lot of Mary Shelley’s prose still in there, but I fleshed out the characterization and the relationships as we’d expect in a novel these days, and I went for a pastiche style which feels 19th century in spirit but might flow a little easier to today’s readers. A large part of that is because I cut all Shelley’s travelogue stuff. Boy, she really padded that thing with chunks of a Grand Tour guide book.

Oh, and I set the action in Paris during the Revolution. That’s because Mary Shelley had Victor creating the monster in 1792, but for some reason had him at university in Ingolstadt – which seemed a bit of a waste of a rather wonderfully serendipitous dramatic setting.

Do you see interactive creations such as Frankenstein as the future of the publishing industry?

Not in the slightest! Take Amis writing Time’s Arrow. He didn’t think, “Now all novels will be written backwards.” My version of Frankenstein is an experiment, that’s all. Literature has always been experimenting and always will. But God help us if publishers suddenly start churning out “classics interactive”.

With the growth of the digital publishing industry, how do you think the issue of piracy will be handled?

Publishing is going to have to learn to get along with digital piracy, unless they have a trick up their sleeve that the music industry didn’t. But it’s not all bad news. We need to look at ways to extend the usual revenue model – slipcase editions with extras, for example, and pre-subscribed serials. Digital can be seen as part of the wide mouth of the funnel that draws paying customers in, whether or not they pay for the digital experience itself.

Do you have any exciting plans for the future?

Fabled Lands LLP, my company with Jamie Thomson, Frank Johnson and Tim Gummer, owns the Dark Lord series, co-created by the two of us and written by Jamie, which won the Roald Dahl Prize and has appeared as a comic strip by Dan Boultwood in The Phoenix. And we have a couple of new series that are about ready to go in book form. We tend to use print as a springboard for properties that we want to go on to develop in other media, which is either cynically manipulative or far-sighted depending on how much of a fiction purist you are.

Add to that my ongoing work on Mirabilis – which was conceived as a 260-page graphic novel saga but is growing to more like a target of 800 pages. And I have a long-cherished videogame project for kids that would be built around forging a real relationship with the characters. So I have more exciting projects than I have time to work on them, that’s for sure.

What would be your dream mash-up novel?

I love mash-ups in music. Have you heard the Arcade Fire v Blondie one? Or that sublime moment in The Sopranos where you realize that, yes, they really are crashing the Peter Gunn theme into “Every Breath You Take”. Oh, and as a role-player I have to give an honourable mention to “Roll a D6” even though strictly speaking it’s a cover spoof, not a mash-up.

So I love that stuff, and I think mash-ups like that are a great modern art form. But (sorry) I have to say that mash-up novels aren’t books, they’re just marketing gimmicks. That “this meets that” thing was always just a formula to get the attention of the dumbest guy in the room. Why, if mash-ups work so well in music and art, do they come across so lame in storytelling? (And, yes, I do mean you, Cowboys and Aliens. Or anything "vs" anything, come to that.) You’d think it would be the easiest medium to do a mash-up in. Maybe that’s the problem. It always feels like creativity by numbers.

But I don’t want to end on a negative note, so let’s take a look at some great mash-up movie trailers. Must Love Jaws and 10 Things I Hate About Commandments are over eight years old but they still haven’t been bettered. Sheer genius.