Gunsmoke and grave-mist

The Kickstarter campaign for all-new gamebook The Good, the Bad and the Undead is painting the town red at the moment. If you don't know anything about it, take a look at Ashton Saylor in the video. I asked him and Jamie Thomson, who was originally slated to write GBU, where they got their ideas from:

Dave Morris: There are so many Wild Wests to choose from. The character dramas of Budd Boetticher’s Ranown Cycle, psychological epics from directors like Mann, Ford and Hawks, and then there’s the whole down-n-dirty, morally complex European tradition of the spaghetti western. I’m just wondering which are your personal favourite western movies?

Jamie Thomson: Pretty much anything with Clint involved. Unforgiven is probably my favourite western of all time. Followed by all the spaghetti stuff. Oh, and also Ulzana’s Raid - a real classic.

DM: Talking of different aspects of the Old West as a story environment, what is it about the setting that appeals to you?

JT: Its semi-feral frontier lawlessness (relatively speaking compared to the east coast cities) allows for greater opportunities in story telling and characterization. Historically, you get a lot of larger than life characters knocking around as well. Plus six guns. They look so cool. And Apaches. And those hats.

DM: What are the themes you were interested in exploring?

JT: Not sure about that... it’s cowboys versus vampires after all. I suppose it touches on fear and the psychology of fear, mortality, death, moral questions about the price of survival, the breakdown of civilization and whether you can remain true to yourself in the face of it and so on. But mostly for me it’s six guns vs fangs in the night

DM: It’s often said that fantasy works when it brings out something in the story that couldn’t be told in a conventional setting. Does that apply to The Good, The Bad, and The Undead?

JT: There are interesting questions about the price you are prepared to pay to keep your own sense of what is right and wrong intact and other issues to explore. But I’m not sure there’s anything you couldn’t do in another setting. I think you can pretty much explore any theme in any setting, just in different ways. With the western horror setting you can push things to the max but at the end of the day I think it’s exploring old themes in new ways, which can sometimes give you an unusual perspective on it.

DM: It’s not a traditional good guys versus bad guys story. I’d be interested to hear what inspired you to take the narrative off in those unexpected moral and emotional directions. Is that coming from the movie idea of the western, or does it owe more to the fact that this is a literary work?

JT: It’s the thing that puts an interesting twist on the tale – the relationship between Walter and the Marshal. What do you do when the good and the bad are faced with an even greater evil? What is it like when you are forced to work with something or someone that you know to be morally unsound (to put it mildly.

DM: Whenever vampires are in a story, there’s the question of whether they should conform to the usual tropes (crosses, holy water, garlic, etc) or whether you’re free to reboot them in a new image. What did you decide?

JT: We’ve got our own take on it from Aztec mythology. They’re not your run of the mill Transylvanian vampires by any means. But I won’t say more in case it spoils the fun.

DM: I see that you’re talking about this as an interactive novel rather than a 'gamebook'. That’s how I describe my retelling of Frankenstein. In GBU’s case, is it simply to alert readers that the story isn’t a game to be won or a puzzle to be solved, or are you getting at something deeper?

JT: There are no dice or skills or any ‘game’ stuff really, so I think it’s just so people don’t get confused, expecting some kind of rule system etc. But Ashton might have a different take on where the story goes!

After sundown

Suffering from Kickstarter fatigue yet? I hope not, as we have one more delectable item for your consideration: The Good, The Bad and The Undead, the gamebook that Jamie was scheduled to write under the working title of Undeadwood as part of our abortive deal to co-publish gamebooks with Osprey.

Ashton Saylor went and pulled the stake out of the project's corpse, and working with Jamie he's cooked up a terrifying, action-filled, interactive novel to fill the hot summer nights as insects buzz and burn in the oil lamp and an eerie howl echoes across the prairie.

The project has its own Facebook page and you can jump right in now and play the demo. This is a print gamebook, not an app (though who's to say that won't come later?) and it has some superbly creepy art by the eldritchly talented Callie MacDonell.

Just to whet your appetite, here's a snippet of my early discussion with Jamie about the concept:

Dave: This is quite interesting (probably an Inca myth originally) and avoids the old "vampires as bats" thing. Another way to get around that is to have the vamps take the form of birds. That's quite common in Romanian myth - usually owls (striges) as they're harbingers of doom. But in the Wild West they could be vultures, or maybe sort of vulture-harpy hybrids, all rank with disease. Harpies were notorious fo being disease-ridden.

Jamie: Chonchons are flying heads, though... But I like the vampire/bird thing. More Aztec. The Vampire Queen can do that anyway, maybe (turning into a vulture is good), but I think the rest of the vampires are pretty much standard vamps. Maybe they don’t get turned back by crosses and can enter the church, because they’re Native American vamps. Though maybe the usual tools should still work. When the Marshal arrives, perhaps the church has already been set alight, or for a while they get into it, safe for a bit but, it being a wooden church, the vamps set it alight. Or the Professor character does, or a captive human in return for freedom. Anyway, I think it’s important that they appear to be ordinary vamps at first. You know, that’s the trope. Then it gets progressively weirder, which will be cool.

Dave: I guess most of the vampires should just be the standard vampire type, ie essentially fast-moving, more-or-less intelligent zombies that drink blood. And only the "bosses" get to transform into things like vultures. The vulture was a symbol of the Aztec state, wasn't it - a vulture eating a snake, I think. That was their Romulus and Remus symbol. Of course, ripping out victims' hearts rather than sucking blood - that'll be a nicely original touch. The chonchons are odd because in some versions they're flying heads, but other folktales have them more like harpies, ie the head becomes a bird. Freaky stuff. Anyway, we don't have to be straitjacketed by what it says in the myths. We can make up our own weird shit.

Jamie: Should the ordinary vamps rip out people's hearts? At the moment, it’s only the Aztec Vampire Queen. That could work, though. She makes vamps, and because her victims are westerners they become traditional western vamps. Well, eastern relative to the Aztecs, I guess, but you get my meaning. So it should only be the Queen who rips out hearts. We save that for the final showdown; it’ll make her more boss-like and fearsome. Maybe the conquistador does the same. Also, she could have a few vampire Jaguar Knights who are her personal bodyguard, and maybe only they eat hearts.

Dave: Just the Queen, I agree. That's her gimmick for creating vamps. The others aren't - what do they call them? The master mold vamps who can create other "sires"? The other vampires would just be your standard blood-suckery types. Still nasty, though. Her guards could actually be were-types: Eagle or Jaguar Knights who become their totem animal. Maybe she has one of each, those are her Oddjob types, ie secondary bosses before you actually have to face her. Also did we talk about doing something with the idea of flayed skin? There was that Aztec deity, the God of Flayed Skin. So some of the vampires could peel a person, put on their skin, and they would appear like them for a while. Sort of Illusion Master style. There could be some tricks for seeing through it... the skin doesn't sweat or something. 

So there you go; that's how we work. A glimpse into the Morris-Thomson creative dynamic. Coming up over the next few weeks, we'll look at how Ashton Saylor took that raw material and crafted it into a new breed of gamebook.

STOP PRESS: Jamie has just (August 6) told me that The Good, The Bad and The Undead is now a Kickstarter Staff Pick.As he put it: "Multiple yee-hahs and an 'I mussst feeeed...'! It's great to have both The Serpent King's Domain and GBU as Staff Picks, so I'm a little excited."

The Good, the Bad & the Undead

Once upon a time in the west of Europe, Fabled Lands LLP planned a co-publishing venture with Osprey Books to release a series of gamebooks. We were scheduled to kick off with the Virtual Reality series, and it was decided that including one new title would give the series a boost. Jamie Thomson agreed to write The Good, the Bad and the Undead.

Well, the best-laid plans... Jamie never got around to writing the book, but that worked out fine in the end because the Osprey deal clutched its heart and died. The VR books got reincarnated as Critical IF, but it looked as if our prospective gunslinging gamebook was destined for six feet on Boot Hill.

But then riding to the rescue came Ashton Saylor. Taking Jamie's notes - well, more like mescal-fuelled mumblings, to be honest - Ashton put together a blistering Wild West tale of heat, greed, lust, and death, where the only thing separating the good guys from the bad guys is whether their burning thirst is for sweet water or salt blood.

All that's needed for The Good, the Bad and the Undead to rise from its shallow grave is your help. Ashton will be running a Kickstarter campaign to fund the book. That starts July 30th. So why am I mentioning it now? Because the Facebook page is already live and in the weeks ahead Ashton and Jamie will be unveiling the secrets of their world, telling us more about the characters and the game mechanics, and revealing some of the extras and stretch goals for the campaign.

I've read the first few chapters and the whole story outline and I can tell you that it's shaping up to be something revolutionary in gamebooks: a compelling mix of nail-biting gameplay and blazing action that comes alive as you read like a blockbuster movie. If you're a fan of gamebooks you will not want to miss this.

And to get yourself in the mood, why not download Per Jorner's Windhammer Prize-winning gamebook "The Bone Dogs"? It's not so much A Fistful of Dollars, more The Dirty Dozen rewritten by Hunter S Thompson, but hey, six guns!

The Outlaw by "kingzog" - used under Creative Commons licence BY-NC-ND 3.0

Quick recap

The last post generated a lot of discussion and some first-rate suggestions, so before tomorrow's new post let's have a quick recap.

I mentioned that Megara's European division will not be running any more Kickstarter campaigns for the foreseeable future. But Megara US, under the guidance of Richard S Hetley, is considering a number of possible projects. I can't speak for them, but I do know that one project that's been floated is a humorous gamebook to be co-written by Paul Gresty and Jamie Thomson. If you've read the Dark Lord books you'll know that one ought to be laugh-out-loud hilarious.

Jamie is also co-authoring the long-awaited Undeadwood (only it won't be called that) with Ashton Saylor, and that should be Kickstarted into existence later in the year. I've seen the plot of that and it's sure to appeal to both old-time gamebook fans and those who want a little more character depth and a more satisfying storyline.

Later in the year there will be Way of the Tiger and Golden Dragon apps from Tin Man Games. We're talking to them about our other gamebook series, but they are deservingly very busy, as are Inkle, so it may be a while before we can get the Fabled Lands apps out. But we will.

Oh, that illustration? It's part of Leo Hartas's map of one of the cities of Orb. Neat, huh?

Undeadwood buried

Back in August I announced that we had a new gamebook project in progress with the working title of Undeadwood. Its real title was going to be The Good, the Bad and the Undead, but the more I think about it, the more I prefer the former. The pitch was "30 Days of Night meets Django Unchained," but that doesn't sound like something I would personally queue up for. (Funnily enough, though, if you said "A Fistful of Dollars meets Cronos," you'd have my money like a shot. Fine distinctions, I guess, as far as the wider world outside cinema geekdom is concerned.)

Even in October I still had hopes. By November I must have known better, but I am adept at denial. Anyway, it was destined to remain a shrivelled thing, hidden from the light. Jamie and I talked briefly about doing it as a comic instead, but that's unlikely now. It has joined the distinguished ranks of gamebooks that never were. That stake is not coming out.

We did at least get as far as a back cover blurb. Well, I say back cover, but it was one of the titles going in the Infinite IF series, which means an ebook, so the blurb was really just for the website:

THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE UNDEAD

Texas, 1870. The small, dusty mining town of Affliction, alone and isolated in the middle of the Badlands is the only place with a gaol for fifty miles in very direction, the only place Marshal da Silva can take his captive, the brutal outlaw, Walter Corse.

But when he arrives in town with his prisoner in tow, it is strangely deserted. The wind moans through the dusty streets and dust devils dance where the townsfolk once walked. But when the night comes... so do the vampires. Affliction has been overrun by them, and many of its inhabitants have been turned. The others are kept as food for the rest. The marshal and the outlaw find a shotgun-toting saloon girl still alive and free. Together they must hold out against the vampire hordes until morning.

Notable vampires include the Sheriff William Masters, Reverend Ezekiel Smith, Jacob Colt, the undead gunslinger, Jimmy Nighthorse, an Apache scout, and several other vampire versions from the mythology of the Old West.

Eventually, the marshal and his companions must take the fight to the chief vampire, Tizoca, the Bled One, an ancient Aztec vampire awoken from her sealed tomb by an over-eager treasure hunting archaeologist, along with her ‘consort’, a Portuguese Conquistador – in fact, the marshal's great, great, great grandfather.

(Okay, okay, so it was notes for a blurb...) If that whets your appetite for gun-totin' gamebook weirdness, all is not quite lost. Per Jorner wrote a great gamebook called The Bone Dogs that's a bit Wild West, a bit magic realist, and you can get that free right here.

The Good, the Bad and the Undead actually began life as a proposal for a first-person shooter that Jamie and I floated at Eidos in the late twentieth century. In that version it was a modern-day western, Dusk Till Dawn style, and I'm not sure whether it had any vampires in it, as our original write-up said:

The town is overrun by all the freaks, monsters and weird stuff that was inside Dr Marvell's Travelling Booth of Wonders. The hero's first job is just staying alive long enough to get to the bottom of things. There are pygmy tyrannosaurs, skeleton outlaws, giant fleas, Sioux medicine men, homicidal fire-breathers, crazed knife-throwing dwarves, and bearded fat ladies who sound like James Earl Jones on steroids. How all these nasties came to be in Dr Marvell's booth doesn't matter. How they even fit inside the booth doesn't matter. All that does matter is they're out for your blood.

Yeah, I know - but FPS isn't exactly about the integrity of the story, you know. Anyway, I guess we could post up the detailed notes for the storyline(s), but in the absence of the book itself (or game itself) it's just so many ideas; there's nothing to play through. However, James Wallis thought "Undeadwood" (the title, that is) would make a great Kickstarter - and he should know better than most - so if anyone wants to have a crack at that, be my guest. I'd like to read it, or play it, or watch it - especially if you can work in an Al Swearengen vampire.

The image is by PurpleFilth on DeviantArt. It's from his own RPG and you can check out his other work, and the terms of the Creative Commons licence, here.

Patience, grasshopper

The mad hunt for bugs in the epub code of the upcoming Infinite IF books has left me with no time for anything else, but hopefully this little taste of a certain famous gamebook series will make up for the dearth of posts.

Those covers, which you'll get to see in all their glory in just a few weeks now, are courtesy of Mikael Louys, sorcerer supreme at Megara Entertainment, and his talented artists Aude Pfister and Mylène Villeneuve. I've been looking at some of the advance material for Megara's Way of the Tiger RPG and it's looking pretty Orb-some.

To anticipate some of the questions about this series:

Will there be print versions?
Osprey are describing the series as "digital only" on their website, but you can bet I'm lobbying strongly for print editions. I don't believe ebook-only is a viable publishing strategy for any books, but most certainly not for something like this. You want something you can collect and keep. Well, I would.

What will the apps run on?
Technically they're not apps, they're fully interactive ebooks, and they'll run on any epub3-compatible e-reading software. Currently that means iBooks, Astri-Bee for Android devices, and Firefox's e-reader plug-in. (If you use that last one, you'll need to switch on Javascript; look for the cog icon at bottom left of the screen.)

What about artwork?
There are a few new filler pieces for the ebooks by Bruce Hogarth, and I'm currently designing covers for the four VR books. (Note to self: hire an artist.) If I get to set up the print books, and if Russ and Leo agree, we'll use their original artwork for those

Are there going to be more Way of the Tiger books?
What's the obsession with Way of the Tiger anyway? Maybe I should read them. If the first two are successful, we'll hopefully go on and do the rest and maybe even continue the series, which fans have told me ends with the hero stuck in a hellish cobweb about to be eaten. I expect Mark Smith had just been watching The Fly on TV or something. "Help meeeee!"

Will the Infinite IF series include any other classic gamebooks?
Fabled Lands LLP owns the rights to Falcon, Golden Dragon, Blood Sword and Duel Master. I can't see how we'd do the last two in this epub3 system - only something like Tin Man's gorgeous apps would do them justice - but Falcon and GD would be easy enough. (Just as long as I don't have to code them. The experience of writing all the Javascript for Frankenstein and four Virtual Reality books over the last seven months has been quite enough, thank you.)

What about all-new gamebooks?
Well, Undeadwood didn't happen. That's a shame, but it doesn't mean we won't try other new titles if the series takes off. Personally I'd like to push the envelope a bit towards the more mature character-driven approach I used in Frankenstein, as zombies and dungeon bashes have zero appeal to me compared to stuff like the Story Mechanics' 39 Steps, but the overall imprint for Infinite IF is called "Osprey Adventures" so I suspect that my own experiments in interactive fiction are more likely to come out elsewhere. Meanwhile, Jamie is going to be fully tied up on Dirk Lloyd and our new kids' series Starship Captain - which is what put the kibosh on Undeadwood. But there's no shortage of excellent gamebook authors out there who we can enlist. Hey, it worked for Jackson and Livingstone.

Cover versions

I'm right in the throes of getting these four gamebooks ready for release next spring, so I'm afraid you'll have to excuse me for keeping this one short.

The first thing I ought to say is that these aren't actually the covers they're going to have when they go on sale. I just knocked these up to have handy copies to write in. It beats feeding reams of paper into the laser printer. Instead, I just have to fiddle around on Lulu for a half hour and lo, it's all sorted and some spanking new paperbacks arrive a few days later. The cover design process is quite therapeutic, too, after hours of flowcharting and proofreading.

The eagle-eyed will notice Twist of Fate has a new title. I never liked the original and this one explains what it's about. Mind you, I have yet to find out what our new publishers think. It could be The Thief of Bagshot by the time it comes out.

Ah yes. Our new publishers... Because this is not a Spark Furnace venture, but rather a partnership with a leading international publisher. If you're any sort of a gaming or fantasy nerd, you'll have heard of them - and, if you're like me, you'll have been collecting their books since you were a kid. I'll let you know who it is (assuming you haven't guessed) as soon as the ink is dry on the deal.

As well as these four books, we'll have an all-new gamebook by Jamie that I'm still going to refer to by the irritatingly tantalizing title of Undeadwood just so I'll have something to post about when we're ready to announce what it's really called. And for the sixth book - well, I'm still hoping it'll be the first in the Way of the Tiger series, and the news as of today is that it probably will be. Maybe even two Way of the Tiger books to kick off and we hold back Undeadwood till the autumn. What would your vote be on that?

We need to talk about Blood Sword

I'm in a bit of a quandary. Maybe you can help.

As part of the worldwide re-release of our old gamebooks starting next spring, Jamie and I have been busy piecing the manuscripts together. Computer memory was at such a premium in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, when everyone wore top hats and smoking jackets, that we didn’t keep digital copies of most of the books. Worse than that, most of them never existed in digital form in the first place, having been hammered out on typewriters or, in the case of Coils of Hate, written in green felt-tip on scraps of paper. (Oh yeah, you think I’m joking…)

So, we’ve been busy with scanners and OCR software, a laborious enough process but almost fun compared to the ensuing stage, when we have to reconstruct the entire flowchart, check it for errors, and then add logic markup for creating ebook versions.

And that’s where the quandary arises. Because the first few books we’re releasing will be Virtual Reality titles, including the new one that Jamie is writing now set in a Wild West of tumbleweed-haunted ghost towns, hard-bitten outlaws, immortal Conquistadores and heart-stealing Mexican vampires. The Virtual Reality system, as gamebook aficionados will know, is based on the skills the player chooses. Dice don’t feature, which makes it perfect for e-gamebooks.

And then we come to Blood Sword.

No wait, first of all you’re going to say, “What about Way of the Tiger?” Well, the fly in the ointment there is that we have the app rights to WotT (iOS, Android, etc) but not the ebook or print rights. And we’d like to get hold of them so as to include Avenger! and the other books in our new venture, but that’s not up to us. We’re trying.

So, Blood Sword. I’m looking at the old copies of those books and I’m thinking who, in this day and age, is going to want to wade through twenty-eight pages of rules before the adventure actually starts? And then there are the tactical maps –

Yes. About those tactical maps. How that happened was that Oliver Johnson and I had been talking to Elizabeth Roy, the editor in charge of Knight Books. (Coincidentally, a decade or two later she became an agent and repped Fabled Lands LLP for a while, but let’s not get distracted.) Liz was looking around for a follow-up series to Way of the Tiger. “It’ll need a USP,” she told us. I thought I had a doozy (or a duesy, if you’re a pedant) in that up to four readers could play together in a team.

Then we got to the big meeting and suddenly it wasn’t that simple. This was the latter part of the 1980s, and the marketing people were starting to take over the asylum. “Where’s the USP?” they said.

“You can play solo or as a party of adventurers,” I said.

I thought that was the clincher, but they continued to stroke their chins and play with their designer glasses.

“Mmm. No, we need a USP. Other gamebooks already do that.”

“No they don’t. Name one gamebook that does that.”

“USP, USP. Not listening. USP.”

Desperation is the mother of invention, as Plato probably said, so I found my mouth opening and waited to hear the fateful words my muse had come up with: “We’ll have tactical maps, a bit like a boardgame.”

Well, there was a rod to beat my own back. I grew to hate writing fight scenes into Blood Sword books because it always meant stopping and drawing a stupid little tactical map. And then, when the books came out, it turned out the maps had been printed at the size of a postage stamp, so good luck actually making any counters to push around that. It frustrated me to think of the thousands of readers who would give up because of those fiddly maps and never get to see all the wonderful adventures I was dreaming up for them. In Book 3 I even resorted to telling them, as near as dammit, to ignore the tactical rules altogether:

“If rules and numbers are not to your taste then you are at perfect liberty to ignore them.”

Twenty-five years on, am I really going to bring the maps back? Today’s gamers prefer simpler rules, and it’s hard to imagine anyone having the patience to move their counters around and wade through all those rules figuring out combat options. Life’s too short. Also, the story ought to be so compelling that you don't want to waste time on dice-rolling.

At least, that’s how I see it. But who am I to tell people how they should find their enjoyment? “Everybody makes their own fun,” as Rebecca Pidgeon’s character says in State and Main. “If you don't make it yourself, it ain't fun, it's entertainment.” Gamebooks are all about the empowerment of the reader, and if that includes the option to spend an evening geeking out with the dice and the pencils and the little tactical grids, well…

And then there’s the digital versions. I hate seeing dice roll around in a videogame or an app. That’s just the legacy of another medium creeping in. And the dice were only ever a way to represent statistical chances and skill-use anyway. Physically rolling them is one thing. Watching virtual dice clatter around puts me in mind of what Byron had to say about Keats’s poetry. (Best draw a veil over that; it’s not for repetition in polite company.)

So I’d rather convert all the Blood Sword books to something like the VR system. It’d be a lot of work, but they already have the character archetypes – trickster, sage, etc – so they’re halfway there. Well, a quarter of the way, at least. And then putting them into ebook format wouldn’t be nearly such a headache.

But hang on now. This is the twenty-first century. Publishing has evolved into something new and polymorphously liberating. I can release a new version of the Blood Sword books for the casual reader, and I can also put out a special “classic edition” with all the baroque rules for the hardcore gamers. And then everyone’s happy. We could even see about getting Russ’s permission to use his original illustrations in the classic edition – like the scary undead thing (above) that came from the meteor in Book 2.

Okay then. Sorted. Thanks for the chat, it really helped.

2013 is "Open Sesame" for gamebooks

Here's what I've been working on while waiting for the proofs for The Court of Hidden Faces to come back from the printer. It's by Leo Hartas, of course - the doyen of gamebook cartographers - but can you name the book?

This is one of six titles with which we're launching our gamebook  co-publishing venture next spring. I can't reveal the full details till we have those contracts inked and in the safe, but all the books will be published in print and ebook editions, with worldwide distribution, and a couple of them (including this one) will also be turned into deluxe iPad apps by the masters of illuminated interactivity, Inkle Studios.

These are all pretty rare gamebooks, so for many readers they'll be completely new. And one of thse six launch titles will be new to everybody, because Jamie is only just starting to write it now. That's the one I've been calling Undeadwood. Think 30 Days of Night meets Django and you won't be far off.

Following those, if they're successful, we'll have Way of the Tiger, Blood Sword, Falcon - and more new titles too. You thought 2012 was turning out to be a good year for gamebooks? You ain't seen nothing yet.