Blood Sword to Dragon Warriors - part 4

We've got another set of stat blocks from the Blood Sword gamebooks, as converted to Dragon Warriors rules by Oliver Whawell. This time it's the turn of Doomwalk (the one where they go to the land of the dead) and you can get the PDF here.

The original 1980s covers were always an oddity, as they were completely different in tone from the books themselves. Blood Sword was verging on grimdark (well, the nearest you could get in a book sold to 10-12 year-olds) before the term was even invented. The covers on the other hand were cute and funny. I'm not sure what the art director at a publishing house actually did in those days. Took long lunches, I suppose.

Thanks to Wombo I've been having a ball rejigging the cover art to suit the interiors. Use of AI art infuriates some people to the point of hysteria, but you can see that (a) it's not going to replace human artists just yet and (b) these aren't for commercial use, so it's not taking away a job that I'd have otherwise hired anyone to do. However, let me just assure General Ludd's followers that I'm doing my bit as the forlorn hope against the forces of AI art by engaging real-life illustrator Inigo Hartas for the Jewelspider project.

In the video below, Grim expresses pretty much how I feel regarding the use of AI art. But I'm open to debate on this, so let me know what you think.

Cannes do

Next month I'm going to be at the Festival International des Jeux as guest of our French publisher Alkonost. I rarely attend games conventions but Russ Nicholson, who died last year, would normally have been at something like FIJ. It's yet another reminder how much we miss him.

FIJ won't lack for stalwarts of the industry, however. Jonathan Green, Sir Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson* will also be there, among others, so if you're able to get to Cannes you'll hear enough gamebook and RPG talk to last you all year.

* But see comments below. I'm only 100% sure about Jon Green.

Polished scales

Following on from last time, some of the Golden Dragon Gamebooks now have a new look. And to commemorate the 39 years since the first two came out, there's a full-colour hardback edition of The Temple of Flame for the wealthy collectors out there.

Impressed? Wait till you see our plans for the 40th anniversary.

Got it covered

Whatever I work on, people ask me about more Fabled Lands books. The sticking point isn't the writing. Paul Gresty, who wrote The Serpent King's Domain, has completed work on a new Fabled Lands Quest based on my Golden Dragon gamebook Castle of Lost Souls. He's also made a start on The Lone & Level Sands, and all that industry has stung me into talk of turning The Eye of the Dragon into another FL Quest to tie in with book 8.

The snag is that artwork is expensive. That bedevilled the Vulcanverse books, which I thought looked amazing with Mattia Simone's atmospheric filler artwork. Myself, I prefer fillers, like the little vignettes Russ Nicholson does for the Fabled Lands books, but most readers demand drawings that illustrate specific scenes in the book. (It's less bother than reading prose.) Also they'd like a lot more illustrations than the Vulcan Forged company were willing to commission for the gamebooks. So how to pay for all that art?

Perruno suggested turning to AI. I'd been thinking about that, though I'm not sure if it saves a lot of money. You can see from the examples here what Wombo Dream came up with off the top of its artificial head. It could be a lot better if I spent a few months practising. But even if that gave us cover art we could use, there's no way any Fabled Lands book could come out without interior illustrations by Russ; he's an integral part of our creative team. And what about maps? The AI is still a few years off (I'm just guessing) being able to handle those.

Then there's the cost of editing and typesetting. And I haven't even talked about paying the writers. After forty years in this business I'm used to the idea that nobody wants to pay the writer, but I'd love to bring in today's top gamebook talent to work on future Fabled Lands books. Paul Gresty of course, but also people like Jonathan Green or Martin Noutch of Steam Highwayman fame or H L Truslove, author of Alba. I have no idea if they'd even be interested, but I wouldn't insult them by asking until I knew I could write a cheque.

Kickstarter doesn't cut it, as I've explained before. I guess we could wait till AI can do the whole job including the writing, but by then the AIs will be the ones reading the books too.

Vulcanverse

Golden Dragon

Fabled Lands

Chaos is your friend

If I had one roleplaying rule that I’d put on a Post-It, it would be: don’t get comfortable. You should always be pushing the game away from the status quo. And that applies to the players as well as the referee.

Campaigns can fall into a lazy story-of-the-week pattern. It’s especially a risk with campaigns built around a party of characters with one common goal – we’re superheroes who protect the world, we’re occult investigators in ‘30s New York, we’re legionaries guarding the frontiers of the empire. If any major event collides with that and breaks the party into pieces, the temptation can be to see it as a temporary aberration that needs to be fixed so that everything goes back to the way it was.

It’s how TV shows used to be before cable. Everything more or less reset so that you could watch episodes in any order. Even with their season arcs providing a loose developing narrative, early Buffy or X Files stories amounted to: “Here are our familiar friends doing their familiar things.” Cosy for fireside viewing, that.

What set me thinking about this was a session in a Last Fleet campaign I played in. The ragtag fleet (this is a Battlestar Galactica type deal) was in need of fuel so a ship was sent to scout out a nearby system with a gas giant and a colonized rocky planet with a refinery. The scout ship found trouble: the satellite network around the colony planet had been destroyed, there was no response from either the refinery or the mining station orbiting the gas giant, and the scout ship came under fire from a cloaked alien fighter. Oh, and they encountered a prison ship with about a hundred detainees in coldsleep.

The damage to the scout ship made it impossible to report back to the fleet, which jumped into the system only to be immediately hit by multiple cloaked attackers. The original scout ship tried to make an emergency landing on the planet. As they descended they saw an immense refugee camp, miles across, presumably housing the colonists who had survived whatever destroyed the satellite network. The scout ship broke up on crash-landing in the desert outside the camp. The pilot (Lt Lightshere) was injured and two other characters, the fleet’s chief scientist (Dr Corax) and a persuasive politician (Mr Coronov), were forced to bail out.

Immediately the characters went into reset-the-status-quo mode: “Get a recovery ship down there. Pick up Lightshere and take him to sick bay. Find Corax and get him to the bridge. We need to figure out a weakness in the enemy’s attack plan.”

By making stories all about solve-the-plot, games tend to steer us in this kind of track. In that context the Ace Pilot's injuries are just seen as an inconvenience, lost hit points that must be quickly fixed by autodoc so he can go back to doing what he usually does. The Brilliant Scientist back on the bridge would set up another by-the-numbers moment: “I’ve analyzed their attack and there is a weakness.” “Good, now that Lightshere is patched up he can lead the squadron. Coronov, you speak to the fleet and reassure everyone…”

But here’s another way to go. Maybe the Ace Pilot's injuries aren’t simple broken bones so much as loss of memory and/or internal injuries. So he wanders into the refugee city not knowing what’s happened, or alternatively is found unconscious by scavengers from the city and taken back there for treatment. The Brilliant Scientist and the Persuasive Politician might not even be with him – they bailed out before impact, so they could be a mile away on the far side of the camp, possibly not even together.

The party is already split. I’m saying you don’t have to fight that. When the story veers off course, keep upping the ante. Pour on the chaos. Let it find a new equilibrium.

This way the characters are thrown into a whole new scenario that could lead anywhere but the cosily familiar. The Brilliant Scientist and the Persuasive Politician might become involved in the refugees’ plight, or be struggling to survive out in the desert. The Ace Pilot might not even know who he is, or that he has internal bleeding that requires expert medical attention within a given time (a doom clock is a common feature of the Last Fleet).

Meanwhile, the away team sent down to the planet to search for them doesn’t have the near-magical tech of anything like tricorders, so they’d be faced with a ramshackle tent city and miles of desert. What are they going to do? Talk to the refugees? Threaten them? Round them up? They’d have to Seek Out the missing player-characters (that’s a move in the Last Fleet rules, hence it's in bold). There won’t even be a single refugee leadership, probably; rather a bunch of factions whose squabbling mirrors the fleet itself.

Imagine it in a TV show. The audience, thrust far outside their comfort zone and with all the characters facing unexpected jeopardy, would be biting their collective nails to the quick. You know this would be better than getting everybody back to the fleet without further mishaps.

This is not a point about railroading, incidentally. It has nothing to do with what the referee originally had planned. The whole principle behind Powered by the Apocalypse games is that everybody is "playing to find out what happens". So it's not particularly the referee's responsibility to decide how the narrative deals with those missing and injured characters. Whether to skip over those details or how to incorporate them is decided by the whole group. What I'm advocating is the notion that when circumstances veer off into the unknown, the players (including the referee) are missing an opportunity if they just struggle to bring everything back to the template they're used to.

If your players are willing to embrace the “interesting chaos” that emerges from a session and run with it, they’ll find the story spinning off in directions that nobody anticipated, and that will provide much more variety than if everyone struggles to block those emergent improvisations and pull the adventure back on course.

The example I’m giving here would entail a lot of scene-hopping. That doesn’t have to mean the players spending a lot of time as passive observers. The situation is tense enough that each group of players – Scientist and Politician in the desert, wounded Ace Pilot in the tent city, the other pilots in their fighters, the bridge crew on the battlestar – can be getting on with their own thing while the referee flits between them. It’s perfect for breakout rooms on Zoom or Discord, but even in real-life gaming there’s always the kitchen or the back yard.

I find there’s a lot to be learned from games like The Last Fleet even though I fight shy of metagaming and authored narratives. The fact is that nothing in Powered by the Apocalypse mechanics obliges you to consciously craft a story rather than let it happen, just as in drama you can write a script in advance but you can equally well wing it on the night. I have other gripes about PbtA mechanics (everything is a special case; making rules story-based rather than skills-based hampers in-the-moment improv; etc) but I can’t agree with one of my players who said of PbtA, “I think you’re working very hard to sell an only slightly dead parrot.” Let’s be more open-minded than that!

Barons and wizards

Arthur: ‘Which is the greatest quality of knighthood? Courage? Compassion? Loyalty? Humility? What do you say, Merlin?’

Merlin: ‘Hmm? Well, they blend, like the metals we mix to make a good sword.’

Arthur: ‘No poetry. Just a straight answer. Which is it?’

Merlin: ‘All right, then. Truth. That's it. It must be truth above all. When a man lies, he murders some part of the world. You should know that.’

Court magician – on parchment it looks like such a cushy job. You get the protection of a great lord. Access to his network of connections. Resources for keeping your laboratory well stocked. Money and space to build up a decent library.

It’s never that easy, of course. Even if your patron is the most sober-minded of barons, he’s going to be calling on your services at any hour of the day and night. What is a court sorcerer for, after all? There are always rivals to be spied on, messages to be sent, opposing armies to be scattered by foul weather, paramours to be seduced with love philtres, stars to be read, ailments to treat, enemies to be stricken with plague. Even Merlin is made to conjure great magic for no better reason than that his lord wants to sleep with another man’s wife.

The court wizard is not only there to cast spells. He's also read a lot of books and is supposed to be wise and well-versed in devious stratagems, making him the lord's valued consigliere. 

There can be far more frivolous demands that that on a wizard’s time. A lord needs something to fill the long winter evenings when it’s too cold and wet to go jousting other knights or stirring up petty wars. Hence King Arthur’s whimsical question about the qualities of knighthood mentioned above, or his bored yearning for strange experiences that brings the Green Knight into Camelot:

‘And also another matter moved him so,

that he had nobly named he would never eat

on such dear days, before he had been advised,

of some adventurous thing, an unknown tale, 

of some mighty marvel, that he might believe,

of ancestors, arms, or other adventures.’

Feasts, holidays, and celebrations are times for a lord to show off his wealth. Minstrels, acrobats, jugglers, jesters, wrestlers – anyone can provide such commonplace entertainment, so to outdo his rivals a lord will need to strive for something more exotic. Dwarves jousting on the back of pigs, cavorting bears, or slaves from Outremer performing the dance of Salome all count as cracking entertainment to the medieval gentry, but the crème de la crème is to bring out a court sorcerer for that frisson of the mysterious, macabre and faintly forbidden.

You might think it’s beneath the dignity of wizards like Merlin or Cynewulf to sing for their supper like this, but after all it’s not so different from after-dinner entertainment in the modern world. If you can get Henry Kissinger to turn up and regale your dinner guests with a few Nixon anecdotes and some takeaway wisdom, the real pleasure is in letting them know you can call on a man who has had the fate of the world in his hands. On a less exalted level, think of Buffalo Bill and Sitting Bull teaming up to mount a Wild West show in front of European royalty and even the Pope. Near-mythic figures have never been averse to cashing in on their reputations.

What would a court magician do to entertain his or her lord’s guests? We have plenty of examples from medieval literature. D B Easter in A Study of the Magic Elements in the Romans d'Aventure and the Romans Bretons cites turning stones into cheese, causing oxen to fly, having asses play musical instruments, bringing folded paper birds to life, giving inanimate objects the power of speech, transforming animals into knights, animating a suit of armour, increasing the size of a room, making water flow uphill, telling fortunes, prophesying the future, and calling up a band of phantom warriors to fight each other.

This post originally appeared on my Patreon page accompanied by a detailed adventure seed or a mini-scenario (take your pick). I'm afraid if you want the scenario too you're going to have to subscribe, sorry about that.

Theme tune

John Whitbourn remarked to me not so long ago that it was a pity we had to drop the comments on this blog for a while, because without them a spark had gone. I know exactly what he means. One of the main reasons I was a Marvel rather than DC fan was the sense of community that Stan Lee brought to the former, and a big part of that came from the lively exchanges on the letters pages.

But even while comments here were shut down I was still getting some feedback -- some of it bubbling up out of the moronic inferno of social media, and other communications (much more civilized) in real life, in emails, and on my Patreon page. John Jones, gamebook expert, valued consigliere and frequent correspondent, made an interesting point about themes in books and roleplaying games. He was talking about how White Wolf's World of Darkness used settings to convey themes and moods, for example Detroit in the '90s, with its theme of decayed grandeur and loneliness. "Detroit," John went on to explain, "was a city built for two million that at that time had 400,000 people or so living in it."

We discussed the themes of the Vulcanverse books, and John made some interesting observations:

"The Houses of the Dead is a little rough because it was the first book, but even there I can see a theme/mood of indifference. Charon knows the living aren't supposed to be in Hades, but the gods are asleep, so what does it matter? The philosophers debate endlessly at their foodless dinner until your character provides the picnic hamper. One of the Fates will give your character a favour for... a honey cake, because why not? 

 
"The Hammer of the Sun's general theme/mood seems to be withering. Without the waters of the rivers, Iskandria is little more than a largish village. The Amazons are basically a largish bandit gang. Even the Sphinxes of the pyramids mostly just slumber in the heat, too weakened or indifferent to guard their homes, for the most part. Heck, Loutro, who knows the rituals of Tethys, will only accompany the character, not actually do the rituals himself.

 
"The Wild Woods' theme seems to be ruin, whether through specific actions (suppressing the rivers) or just general neglect. The bridge-nets for the catapult travel system are in disrepair. Fort Blackgate is a ruin, home to a vile giant. The Summer Palace, home of a powerless king, is in bad shape. Even the Great Green Ones are slowly dying, just like the child of the truffle hunter who is unwittingly killing them.

"The Pillars of the Sky's theme seems to be isolation. One of the few surviving minotaurs roams his labyrinth alone. The bosgyns live away from their men. Stuck in their Great Sinkhole city the Gargareans dwell on their own perceived superiority, which allows them to brutally mistreat their captives and attack others as lesser beings. Even Boreas, the north wind himself, is isolated and trapped in a frozen moment of time by the Uroboros Ring."

I like thinking about things like this, and John and I got to talking about the fifth book in the series, Workshop of the Gods. The theme there would be secrets – the hidden social traps, the societies and gangs, scheming individuals weaving plans, and the ultimate secret being: what’s behind the curtain?

Well, that's my notion of it, anyway. The actual answer might turn out to be be completely different from that. The mood/tone is yet another question. I’m not sure how well my and Jamie's styles mesh these days, and would readers find that jarring if we each wrote half a book? The join might show in both style and theme. Every memorable IP in books, comics, TV, games, you name it, has a unifying theme that is the soul of the story, whether planned or otherwise. Take a look at your own favourites. Even if you haven't consciously dug down into the themes before, you'll probably find they've influenced you profoundly all the same.