Getting started in the Vulcanverse

As with a lot of open-world gamebook series, you can begin your adventures in any of the Vulcanverse books. In each case you play through your childhood, your choices in those early flashback years shaping the kind of character you're going to start as -- your skills, deity, any starting gear, and so on. It's a little more involving than just rolling a bunch of dice.

In the first four books, whichever you pick, those childhood events are more or less the same. In Workshop of the Gods, though, it's a little different. Now you're not starting in a rural area; you grew up in the biggest city in the Vulcanverse and your family and home there provide a base you can return to.

Your early-life choices in the city are different from the other four books. Having defined your initial abilities, you're then presented with a couple of opportunities to acquire mentor characters. First, when watching your uncles play a board game, you notice a strange antique coin and if you ask about it you may end up meeting a veteran who will guide you through quests in Book 2: The Hammer of the Sun. Then later, shopping with your aunts, you can ask them about the land of Arcadia and thereby acquire a mentor who'll prompt you to undertake quests in Book 3: The Wild Woods.

In both cases you get the option to ignore the cue, thereby avoiding these mentors. Game designer Ernest W Adams has pointed out that when presented in a game with, say, an interesting inscription, there's no point in giving the player the choice of "look at the inscription" or "don't look". That's a non-choice, because why wouldn't the player look unless there's some other cost to doing so? (For example, unless they're being chased and stopping to study an inscription puts them at risk.)

But I still give players the choice of passing on the mentors for two reasons. First because your decisions at this stage of the book aren't only setting your starting stats; they're also shaping how you think about your character. Do you look after your younger brother with love, or through a sense of duty, or do you leave him to fend for himself? Making that choice will determine the character you're playing not only in game terms but in your own conception. Ignoring the cues from your uncles and aunts tells us the kind of self-sufficient person you might be.

Also, not all players are going to want mentoring. You can strike out into the other regions of the Vulcanverse and just discover quests at random. That's fine if you have the time for exploration and you don't need any hand-holding. Others will appreciate being given some hints -- and if so you can pick up more hints, though of a less structured sort, by talking to the Oracle at the temple of Apollo.

When out in the world you can find companions who will travel with you. They sometimes offer advice, but usually only after you've already embarked on a quest. They don't tend to nudge you towards any particular goal. If you like setting your own goals, forget the mentors but it's still worth picking up a companion. There are a couple you can find fairly easily if you look around the south-eastern part of Notus in The Hammer of the Sun.

Mentors differ from companions because they don't accompany you. They'll look at what you've achieved so far, suggest the next stage of a quest and give you some clues as to how to go about it, then with a pat on the back or a kick in the pants they'll send you off to try it. You can return to the city and seek them out if you're having trouble. The advantage of doing it that way is you get quests sliced up into readily achievable chunks, which a lot of players prefer to just playing on till they're tired. The mentor lets you know when you've hit a convenient episode break.

So, whether you're a self-starter or whether you like taking advice from a friend, either way you should find what you're looking for in Vulcanverse Book Five: Workshop of the Gods. Still, the books in the Vulcanverse series are not self-contained; they comprise one vast connected saga.

To give you an idea of the sweep and scope of that saga, think of the Sorcery! series by Steve Jackson. That's four big gamebooks to start off with. Now add the original six books of the Way of the Tiger series. Then pile on top of those the first four of Joe Dever's Lone Wolf books. All together that lot is as long as the Vulcanverse series. Vulcan City is a good place to begin, but you'll soon need to venture into the the other realms, so start off with a couple of books and bear in mind you'll need all five to complete the full adventure.

Likeability is overrated

I've said it before: in fiction (but not in life) likeability is overrated. Here's author Robert J Sawyer on one of the Five Things You Need To Write Compelling Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories:

'An interesting character. Not necessarily a likeable one, not even necessarily a relatable one, but an interesting one. The best example of a complex main character in all of science fiction is Robinette Broadhead in Frederik Pohl’s Hugo and Nebula Award-winning Gateway, which is told as flashbacks during Broadhead’s psychoanalytic sessions with a computerized shrink. He’s not at all likeable, but, wow, is he ever fascinating.'

It also applies to player-characters in games. Players can be too worried that others will judge them personally by the characters they choose to play. Screw that. There's nothing more boring than a game populated by decent people, however much we'd like real life to be like that. Make your characters interesting, and never mind if they're nice.

Some more thoughts from me on that here and here. But you're always having to put up with what I think, so if you're pressed for time look at Mr Sawyer's advice. Like Pohl, he too has won the Hugo and Nebula Awards. He says, 'I was born to write for [the Star Trek] franchise!' and I concur. I would love to see his take on the ST universe.

Verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways

John Whitbourn, like his Binscombe Tales character Mr Disvan, seems somehow to know just about everything that's going on. Out of the blue he sent me a clipping from the 2023 Salute show guide. 

It was gratifying to see a nod to Dragon Warriors from esteemed author Sarwat Chadda, and all the more so because it sounds as if DW helped to teach him the right lesson about both writing novels and running roleplaying campaigns, namely that "character is king" and it's the player-characters and not the plot that should drive the flow of the narrative.

We've talked long and often about the importance of going with the flow, how games best create stories, narrative emergence from character, and embracing chaos as the way to drive the story forward. It's the key to how Stan Lee swept Marvel to success in the 1960s, as Reed Tucker explains in his book Slugfest:

I was always concerned that the scenarios in the original Dragon Warriors books mustn't give first-time GMs the impression that adventures should be planned out like that. To me the prepared adventure is the safety net, the characters are the trapeze artists, and ideally the net doesn't need to be used -- or at most is the MacGuffin that gives the characters an ostensible reason to interact.

That's even more the underlying ethic of Jewelspider, my second look at the lands of Legend through a more folkloric lens. The Jewelspider book is being illustrated by Inigo Hartas (Leo's son) and you can see from his blog that it's in safe hands. The Patreon page pays for the art and maps, and as well as the prototype versions of Jewelspider you get regular articles and adventure seeds, access to various things I've worked on over the years, and rough cuts of upcoming work such as the endlessly-deferred Tetsubo. Tempted to quit the well-travelled path and strike out into faerie woods? Then join us.

Character sketch

On the rare occasions when I've played D&D I usually haven't taken it very seriously. In my defence, that was mostly back in the mid-'70s and the way the early books were written I don't think you were meant to take it seriously. I don't mean the rules; we used the latest iteration of those for the Blood Sword RPG and they work brilliantly. But the default fantasy setting of D&D is a bit sub-sub-sub-Tolkien by way of Monty Python, or so it usually seemed to me.

There were exceptions. I ran a Victorian-era investigative campaign (this was years before Call of Cthulhu, never mind Cthulhu by Gaslight) in which the only magic was 1st and 2nd level. That wasn't played for laughs. Also, when I joined in a game of Blood Sword 5e I not only thought it was brilliantly atmospheric, I actually liked the game system, which was several quantum leaps beyond the D&D of fifty years ago.

Anyway, back to 1976. Invited to join a D&D game by Steve Foster, creator of the Mortal Combat rules, I rolled up a Cugel-like knave called Necromageus Knoll, who soon had a reputation for greed, deceit and treachery. Come to think about it, he was three parts Cugel, two parts Zachary Smith, and one part Tricky Dicky.

The other players seemed to find Necromageus Knoll jolly enough that I put him in a comic strip (inexplicably relocated to the Tekumel underworld, hence the reference to 'Eyes') that lasted a week or two until we moved on to other campaigns. I did something similar but more serious a few years later with this authentic Tekumel write-up.

Having come across that Necromageus Knoll strip just recently, and intrigued to see how my visual storytelling had developed between 1976 and 2008 when I came to write Mirabilis: Year of Wonders (long story short: a lot!) I thought I'd share a bit of it here. Don't worry, I won't quit the day job.

WEIRD is too normal

Paul Mason, who has lived in Japan for the past 30 years, has long maintained that Westerners don't know how to play "real" Tsolyani. An example he gives is that we might think of ourselves as Kolyemu of the Black Stone Clan, but it would be more accurate to say that the Tsolyani view would be, "I am the Black Stone Clan's Kolyemu."

I was reminded of that by this review of Joseph Heinrich's book The Weirdest People in the World:

"Standing apart from the community, primed to break wholes into parts and classify them, Westerners are more analytical. People from kinship-intensive cultures, by comparison, tend to think more holistically. They focus on relationships rather than categories."

Players in games go on and on about their character's traits and foibles in a way that somebody from a non-Western non-industrial culture probably never would. It's a habit that has only got worse as an obsession with story tropes and character arcs has taken hold in roleplaying. It's a very 21st century mannerism to tell people that you're on the spectrum (if it's a spectrum then who isn't?) or to narcissistically expatiate on your life goals and attitudes.

I'm using Tekumel as an example, but this applies to all RPG culture gaming. There's a lot of it about, I'm glad to say. Some friends of mine are currently playing as Gwich'in tribespeople in 19th century Yukon. I make periodic stabs at publishing my and Jamie's Tetsubo game set in the Sengoku period. And I don't need to tell you that the medieval Europe on which Legend is modelled is a very foreign country to us today. These are all good examples of culture gaming, but it only pays off if the players are willing to make an imaginative leap outside their modern mindset into the perspective of an entirely different time and place.

The trouble is, modern Westerners are not at all interested in diversity. Oh, you think diversity is being championed these days? Not a bit of it; it's just lip service. Look at a Marvel movie or pretty much any fantasy TV show. Sure, there'll be folk of all hues and accents. But all those characters are really Westerners at heart, with modern Western attitudes and the same glib Waititian sense of humour. If diversity was what we actually cared about then we'd be watching movies from other lands and cultures and times. We'd stop the empty virtue-signalling and really get out of our comfort zone.

Does it matter? Well, you can roleplay any way you like. Do whatever you enjoy, sure. But I would say that roleplaying is rewarding when it takes us on an imaginative leap outside ourselves, and that counts double when it allows us to slip outside our cultural preconceptions. Then it isn't just fun but it expands the mind and lets us appreciate how richly varied the human race can be.

A kind of tribalism

The way you choose to roleplay is up to you and your gaming group. Of course it is. But if you’re asking me, I don’t see the point of doing anything if you’re not going to commit to it heart and soul. Roleplaying to me means trying to be somebody else, imagining the reality of their life, and acting as they would. It’s fiction in the moment. And fiction is a parallel reality evoked by imagination that, while the spell lasts, should be taken as seriously as the reality we live in the rest of the time.

The road to Damascus ran through Keble College. It was 1980. I was running a Tekumel campaign and Paul Deacon, playing a pe choi called Keq Yossu, balked after hearing the lead-in to the evening’s adventure. ‘I’m not coming along.’

The others were aghast. ‘But… what are you going to do all evening, in that case?’

‘The whole set-up sounds off to me. You do what you like, but count me out.’ Paul dropped out of character a moment: ‘I’ll help Dave roll for the NPCs.’

It was the first time I’d thought of really getting into the head of a character that way. I admired Paul for it, and I admired him even more when he was proved right a few hours later. The whole party got wiped out. Paul imagined Keq Yossu getting the news back in Jakalla: ‘I did warn them…’

Not long after, in my Medra campaign, Mike Polling’s character Dagronel Kabo-Drasden befriended an NPC who was the sworn enemy of several of the other player-characters. When it came to the crunch, Dagronel sided with the NPC. In the game post-mortem, the other players were indignant. ‘You can’t value friendship with a nonplayer character above your comrades,’ they argued.

Mike pointed out that a roleplaying campaign is a fiction populated by characters. Nobody wears a lanyard saying PLAYER; it isn’t a Westworld style theme park with hosts vs guests. To use Professor Barker’s adage, there are no NPCs. Just characters. It’s only in bad fiction that somebody behaves out of character to ensure the plot goes in a pre-planned direction.

Both Paul and Mike are arts graduates, and it was an eye-opener for this scientist to see them insist on roleplaying as an art form. It was about then I started to eschew underworlds and puzzles. I should’ve known from Columbo that the how and the who are never as interesting as the why. Motivation is what matters. Characters who look at their world and say, ‘This is how it affects me and this is what I must do.’

Without that revelation, heaven knows what Dragon Warriors would have been.

I still come across the old-school approach, but these days it baffles me. A few years back I was playing in an SF campaign set in the Mass Effect universe. One character was a law enforcement agent. Some of the other PCs were rebels or pirates or – look, I don’t know anything about Mass Effect; in Firefly terms most were Browncoats and one was an Alliance officer. When it all kicked off, the agent sided with the local planet’s police and tried to arrest the Johnny Rebs.

Afterwards, one of the players in particular seemed to take it very personally – in real life, that is, not as his character. He went away seething. I asked a friend of his what was the matter. ‘He believes strongly in the players sticking together,’ he said. ‘He’s annoyed that player took the side of the police against the rest of us.’

‘But… what did he expect? The guy was playing a federal agent.’

‘He doesn’t think character should trump party loyalty.’

I honestly don’t know why you’d roleplay if you feel that way. Without commitment to character you might as well be paintballing. If you want PCs to stick up for each other, you have to give them a reason beyond the fact that they're all controlled by people sitting around the same table.

On the other hand, I also care that movies, TV drama and novels maintain integrity to the fiction they’ve created, yet a lot of people seem quite happy to excuse out-of-character swerves that are there to keep the plot on the rails the writer planned. To me that’s just not doing the work. It could explain why when I was a little kid and my school took us all to a Christmas panto it was loathing at first sight.

Everyone’s got their own setting on this dial. An it harm none, do as ye will. But what I want is to plunge right in to the imaginary lives we evoke through roleplaying, convinced there’s something amazing to be found there if just for a few hours we can let go of being ourselves.

Wouldn't have to work hard

What happens when the PCs get rich? Mike and Roger raised the question on Improvised Radio Theatre With Dice not so long ago. (I get so many springboard topics of discussion from those fellows I should pay them a royalty.)

Of course, it depends if the character’s main motivation was always cash. A rock star or boxer or actor hitting the big time might suffer an existential crisis until they realize it was the art or the sport that they really loved, not the fame and fortune. They may even find they’ve lost by winning. Adventurers in fantasy fiction often undertake the quest for other reasons: glory, friendship, duty. Achilles and the others were no doubt looking forward to the payday when Troy fell – what ancient hero didn’t enjoy a bit of city-sacking? – but their reasons for being there in the first place were many and complex.

Conan becomes a king, and in The Way of the Tiger gamebooks the character goes from being a lowly sewer rat to the headaches of running a kingdom. I had a Tekumel character who was one of the lowest of the low. He struck it rich but that wasn’t nearly the end of the story, because in Tsolyani society there’s no real provision nor room for upstart commoners. The campaign only came to an end a long time later when he led his clan to the far corners of the world and conquered a kingdom.

Joining the 1%, even when that was genuinely what you wanted all along, could be the start of your problems. You don’t even have to be nouveau riche to attract the jealousy of the ruling class. Nicolas Fouquet made the mistake of outspending the King of France. He was arrested by d'Artagnan (no, really) and spent the rest of his life in jail.

Even if you keep your freedom, most societies have things that money can’t buy – especially the feudal societies of many fantasy campaigns. Sumptuary laws will prohibit you from aping your betters. Most interactions in the world will depend on custom, land, rank – all things you might obtain if you are artful and lucky, but never simply by throwing money at the problem.

It all goes to underline that you can’t say how vast riches will affect characters in the campaign until you know the society. The rich industrialist in Bleak House is treated very differently by the ruling classes than his equivalent number in Tono-Bungay, which is set just half a century later.

Retiring the character when their objective is reached is a perfectly respectable option. It’s not just over-stuffed coffers that deprive a character of their motivation. Any specific objective, finally fulfilled, may leave you wondering what to do with the character next. In both Eureka and There Will Be Blood the lead character achieves the high point of his life near the start and then must deal with the long wait for death. Those stories might be a tad contrived in order to serve the purposes of drama. While some people might be left rudderless by success, most of us on achieving one objective would set our sights on fresh goals. After Elon Musk has the perfect self-driving car, there’s always Mars.

Camus said we must imagine Sisyphus happy. Some find that a paradox, but consider it the other way round -- if Sisyphus didn't have the boulder, he wouldn't be content until he found something else to strive at. If you construct your characters around one movie-style objective then they will get there and have to hang up their spurs. Make them more complex, with multiple shifting goals, and they'll have more life.

The player who couldn't make it

'You killed my character and I wasn't even there!'

It was the early days of roleplaying and we were still feeling our way, but the player was right to be aggrieved. It's like borrowing a friend's Hellblazer collection and returning it covered in coffee stains. (A sore point; we won't go into that.) Still and all, what should I have done? We'd been in mid-battle the previous session, we'd had to press pause, and that player hadn't been able to turn up to the next game.

I can't remember what I decided. There might have been a retcon, but I was pretty hardline in those days so maybe the player just had to suck it up. At any rate, they didn't die in vain. From then on it was understood that PCs wouldn't get killed in the player's absence.

One simple solution is to avoid breaking the session in the middle of a fight. I've talked before about why cutting a session there doesn't work. There are more suspenseful ways to build in a cliffhanger. For instance, suppose it's the eve of Waterloo and the player-characters are sent to evacuate an important NPC from a chateau some miles from the main battle line. They get there only to learn that an enemy detachment is also heading that way. That's a good point to break. There's tension, there's uncertainty. Before the next session the players will be thinking about what to do. Run for it? Barricade the chateau and make a stand? Head towards the enemy for a surprise attack? Negotiate? Disguise one of the party as the NPC?

The icing on this cake is that if any player can't make the next session it's easy to explain away their absence. Maybe they've made a break for it with a message for high command, or they're out scouting the enemy's position. Contrast that with having the enemy characters burst into the chateau and then breaking till next time. Quite apart from the problem of having to cold-start with action rather than character interplay, you have no easy way to account for the absent PC. They were there last time making plans with the rest of the team -- but for some reason they sit out the fight? The other players can just shrug and accept it, the way you have to give a free pass to plot details in Doctor Who, but it's not great for immersion. In every way the former solution works better.

It's easier when you have plenty of prior warning that a player can't turn up. Their character can be off doing something else and there's no need to come up with an excuse for them not taking part in the action. Our long-running Tekumel campaign used to be run by me and Steve Foster (the designer of Mortal Combat and Eureka) taking turns as referee. We soon spotted the flaw in this arrangement: our own characters were only getting to be half as powerful as the rest of the party. Our fix was to award our own characters 80% of the average experience points earned by the other characters for sessions when we were refereeing not playing, the one-fifth deduction reflecting the fact that we weren't in danger of death. If a player couldn't turn up one week, they got the same deal.

Nowadays it's less of a problem because I don't tend to bother with awarding experience points, or else I play in games run by referees brought up in a culture of "every kid gets a prize" who scrupulously award each character the same experience regardless of what they did. In settings less vivid and immersive than Tekumel, suspension of disbelief may be less of an issue and players may just accept without comment that a character blinked out of existence for a week. Whatever works for your group, just so long as you don't hand a borrowed character back in a body bag.

Killing no murder?

It was a Victorian setting, and the player-characters had pursued a mad scientist to the top of the world. (There's something about mad scientists and the Arctic.) They trounced her hirelings, broke up her lab, put paid to her callous experiments, then one of the characters snapped. 'We'll never bring her to trial,' he said before giving her both barrels of his shotgun.

That summary execution might seem shocking, but I've been hardened by years of refereeing. We had one player-character whose thing was butchering 'witches' -- a term he seemingly applied to any woman with a scheme in the pre-industrial era. On Tekumel I've seen captives hurled in their hundreds into the fiery pits of sacrifice, and slaves slaughtered to pay a demon for a minor gift.

Most horrible of all (it still makes my flesh creep) was the time in Crossgate when the characters got hold of their longtime enemy Lord Belvoir, who had unwisely stopped at the manor house without his men. It was Twelfth Night, but what they did made Lavinia's fate in Titus Andronicus look tame. They truly got medieval on his ass -- but then, it's Legend, so 'medieval' is exactly right. Isaac Babel would have recognized it:

'I'll put it this way. With shooting you just get rid of the person. Shooting lets him off easy, and it lets you off easy too. With shooting you'll never get down to the soul -- where it is in somebody, how it shows itself. So I don't spare myself. More than once I've stamped on a foe for an hour or more. You see, I want to get to know what life is like, what it's really all about.'

As the referee, it's not my job to comment on the characters' deeds. Nothing should be out of bounds. Roleplaying, like art in general, should be free to go anywhere, and in refereeing I have to be like God, who never has anything to say when a child is raped or a man has his hands macheted off. After the game it's a different matter, and then I will sometimes confess that the PCs' moral attitudes give me a shudder. I regard capital punishment as barbaric and vigilantes as scum. Vigilantes who dress up their killings as justice are committing plain murder.

Naturally the players get prickly about that. They don't want to be thought of as murder hoboes. They see themselves as heroes -- and so they should. If you're in character, of course you think you're in the right. Hitler believed he was a good guy just as much as Gandhi did.

'I'm not the Red Skull,' one player retorted, 'I'm Judge Dredd.' If the judges of Mega-City One existed in real life, they'd be the goon squad of somebody like Ramzan Kadyrov, not stalwart defenders of civilized society. But let's face it, pretty much all cops in drama are rule-bending, violent, arbitrary, partial, unstable and dangerous. Stories have their own rules and (one of the big mistakes a beginning writer can make, this) likeability is overrated. Player-characters should be interesting, they don't have to be likeable -- at least, they don't have to be likeable to civilians in a comfortable 21st century democracy.

A murder hobo PC is boring. They'll shoot every NPC in the face and they do that because the player's imagination is too limited to see the NPCs as real people. But characters who wreak terrible violence because of their own sense of justice, however warped and self-righteous that may be, can be very interesting indeed. They're Bond, or Dredd, or the Punisher, or Philip Jennings. There's an inner contradiction that has to go somewhere, and the player is inhabiting the character thoroughly which means they're on an interesting journey too. Consider for example E M Forster's self-analysis of his time in Egypt:

'I came inclined to be pleased and quite free from racial prejudice, but in ten months I’ve acquired an instinctive dislike to the Arab voice, the Arab figure, the Arab way of looking or walking or pump-shitting [pissing] or eating or laughing or anythinging—exactly the emotion that I censured in the Anglo-Indian towards the native. It’s damnable and disgraceful, and it’s in me.'

Forster had found in himself a knee-jerk racism that horrified him. He didn't go so far as murdering anyone, of course, but it was nonetheless a darkness within that he came face to face with and, with his scrupulous honesty, confessed to. Roleplaying lets us do the same and come away knowing ourselves and being better people for it. Or so I hope of my more violently inclined players, anyway.

The personal touch

Gamebook maven John Jones was in touch with the Fabled Lands team recently with an intriguing suggestion – indeed, a creative challenge – that occurred to him while watching Jessica Jones:

“What is interesting about the conflict between Jessica and Kilgrave is the personal nature of it. Unlike other villains, Kilgrave has only one very goal he wants to achieve and any effect he has on the larger world comes in service to that goal. At the same time Jessica has her own very personal goal. I mention this to contrast it with the main conflict in The Serpent King's Domain. To Namagal it's a very personal situation involving his death and/or humbling. To the viewpoint character playing the book, it is (or can be) little more than an item on a to-do list toward achieving a different goal. I make that contrast because one thing I'd like to see in The Lone and Level Sands or perhaps a later book is for an important quest to be personal and important to the viewpoint character.”

Of course, conflict is almost always more interesting when it’s personal. After a love story, perhaps the most compelling of narratives is a war in the family:

It only works when it’s earned, of course. Batman v Superman did nothing but lay popcorn-brained waste to the surprising-yet-inevitable showdown which in Frank Miller’s original story came at the endpoint of a difficult friendship that had struggled on against the odds for decades.

The point of the personal conflict is to up the stakes. The story has more bite, more pain, more inner struggle. We, the readers or viewers, feel more strongly involved. But writing rules are no substitute for commonsense. All those screenwriters who feel the need to make Robin the Sheriff of Nottingham’s half-brother, take note. And let’s also point an accusatory finger at the recent Harry Potterization of the 007 franchise, in which every adversary must be tied to Bond’s angsty childhood. Puh-lease. It’s more Charlie Higson than Ian Fleming.

The sharpening effect of personal conflict is why I don’t object to a little PvP in my roleplaying games. The civil war that happened in our Tekumel campaign was a classic tragedy in the making, with the player group splitting right down the middle. Jamie told his wife that the Tsolyani civil war was the most important thing in his life at the time. I can believe it. Think of any time you and somebody you care about have ended up on opposite sides on an issue of passionate importance. There’s a wrench in the gut that goes far beyond mere difference of opinion.

The Tsolyani example reminded me of a letter I got from Professor MAR Barker back in November 1985:

"Eyloa the Wizard of the Tlashte Heights, played by Mike Callahan, just discovered that the Pariah Deities' chief agent in his sector, Torsu, is in reality his own father. I was told later that this is a rip-off of the Star Wars plots, but then I have been running this particular campaign since before The Empire Strikes Back and all along the storyline has been the same."

So you can pull off the same trick between player and NPC. I must have been aiming for something like that in my second-ever gamebook, The Temple of Flame, which begins by establishing the backstory between the lead character and their former colleague Damontir the Mad, who is the book’s antagonist. Players of Heart of Ice have remarked that though the possible endings include saving the world and seizing ultimate power, nothing compares to meting out just deserts to the weaselly Kyle Boche. And even in Fabled Lands we have recurring adversaries like Talanexor the Fire Wizard and your persistent frenemy Lauria. You want to see more of them, don’t you?

Which brings us back to John Jones’s suggestion. I’m not going to reveal what he proposed because it was really cool and maybe Paul Gresty will want to run with it in future books. All I will say is that it made me think of Fritz Leiber Jr, and that’s never a bad thing.

Like an egg stain on your chin

Recently I’ve been reminiscing about our roleplaying days of yore. Not in order to wallow in nostalgia, but for the sake of some interviews and podcasts I was doing. I talked about the saturnine loner who achieved enlightenment and saved the people he realized were not lackeys but friends. The civil war that split our party when each player-character came to different conclusions about the right and honorable course. The subtle ways that characters within a legion, even at different ranks, could push their disagreements as far as military rules allowed.

I’m forced to the conclusion that the roleplaying was better back then – more immersive, more nuanced, more surprising – when we just took a Tirikelu character and developed them by playing. Now we mostly use GURPS, which encourages you to plot out every preposterous detail of the character before you start playing. It’s not a springboard for the imagination. More often it’s just a straitjacket.

And by the way, I'm just singling out GURPS because it's the game I've played most in the last ten years. Plenty of so-called narrative systems are just as bad, with their nannying insistence on each player writing down which other character they like, which one they have a grudge against, and so on. It's like being at infant school and being made to write about your weekend. The point of playing is to discover these things, not scribble the backstory to a bad novel.

I much prefer the approach taken by Stephen Dove for his Jewelspider Chronicles campaign. There you begin with a short "mission statement" for the character, clarifying some background details but leaving plenty of room for future development. As an example, here's my initial description of the character I played in Tim Harford's Company of Bronze campaign.

I already talked about why GURPS’s mental disadvantages don’t work but there’s a problem with character disadvantages in general. Say you cap disadvantages at -20 points. All the players will immediately take the maximum allowed. What's wrong with this picture? Simply that if the disadvantages were properly priced, you'd expect to see some players not bother with them at all.

“Ah, but character diamonds.” No, giving extra points for disadvantages is the junk food version of interesting characterisation. A lame epileptic drug-addicted albino with the regulation five quirks is not the slightest bit interesting. What makes a character compelling is in the gap between desire and duty, wants and needs, feelings and experience. And better by far if those internal conflicts are drawn with a subtle brush, not the cartoonish personality traits offered by the GURPS rules.

So I'd allow players one disadvantage. Just one. That's it. Not a mental one, either, because they're all anathema to good roleplaying. If you take the disadvantage, you can spend the points on an advantage. Again, just the one.

How are you going to get that interesting characterization? Do what good roleplayers manage without any of the personality-by-numbers stuff. As Laurence Olivier said: dear boy, just try acting.

Bundles of neuroses

The other night I got a close-up view of a massacre.

Not in real life, thankfully. It was the finale of a Victorian-era campaign I’d been running for over a year. The player-characters caught up with some people who were responsible for a series of horrible deaths in the name of mad science.

The PCs found the scientists unarmed at an Arctic base and they blew them away in cold blood. An old man, a woman, and a child who happened to be in the way. One of them shot in the back, too.

So they saved the world, but in hunting monsters they had indeed become monsters themselves.

Now, I’m not complaining. I love that the heroes of the piece might turn out to be stone killers. Afterwards I mentioned to the players that refereeing a session like that like is having a front row seat at a really gripping movie, but actually it’s much better. Movies these days, impressive though they may be with their CGI-candy, too often lay themselves down in the well-worn story patterns taught in screenwriting classes, like old dogs with a favourite spot before the fire. I want to be surprised, even shocked. I want characters who act in unexpected, complex, and non-trope-driven ways. For that you need a roleplaying game.

There’s a but. We use GURPS for most of our games these days. The reason is that 4th edition is well-designed (at the core anyway; all the special cases slightly break it) and has the breadth to cover everything. The characters go to buy hunting rifles for their trip to Norway, or need to check fatigue for trekking through a marsh in a thunderstorm. Fine, there are rules already written for that, so I can just focus on the game.

The trouble is that GURPS doesn’t easily make provision for the character who develops in an unexpected direction. You have to set out everything about the character before you start playing them. In the case of my campaign, one of the characters had Honesty, which in GURPS 4e doesn’t just mean an inability to lie but indicates that you are rigidly law-abiding and, says the rulebook, “you may never commit murder”. Yet that PC did commit murder in a form that should appall any Victorian gentleman. And so did others of the PCs who had traits like Code of Honour (Gentleman’s), which in GURPS are classed as mental disadvantages and are worth extra character points.

I wouldn’t want to straitjacket the players by forcing them to stick to the stereotypes encouraged by the GURPS rules. Enforcing that would be barely any advance on D&D's boneheaded alignment system. As I said, the fun is in seeing the surprising yet inevitable way players respond to their experiences. Bloody and brutal murder seems inconceivable in the lounge of the Reform Club, but out on the rim of the Empire Victorian and Edwardian gentlemen had their own Mỹ Lais. How dull if a player had to say, “My character sheet has Law-Abiding for -10 points so I stop before committing the murder.” Might as well just let the sheet turn up and play the game, in that case.

Diehard GURPS players will say this is already catered for by the rules. You can spend future character points to buy off those mental disadvantages that no longer apply. But… ugh. That’s spreadsheeting, not roleplaying.

This is of course the old debate about how PCs should be created, which was discussed in some detail by Tim Harford in a guest post on this very blog.

“This discussion has been called ‘DAS vs DIP,’ or ‘Design At Start’ versus ‘Develop In Play’. GURPS is both the archetypal design system, and the classic method of producing full formed characters. I turned my mind to the problem of Develop In Play with GURPS characters and it turns out to be almost impossible to do this without chucking out the whole character system. Many other systems turn out to be strange hybrids in which—for instance—attributes are rolled, but skills are chosen within some kind of budget. This is less logical, but fits much better with a Develop in Play approach.”

The sensible answer is simply not to allow mental disadvantages in the game. As Tim said in his referee notes at the start of the Redemption campaign:

“GURPS mental disadvantages are all caricatures, so I want to avoid using them. This will save us all the hassle of dealing with the inevitable string of stubborn, overconfident, impulsive characters with pirate codes of honour. Another reason to avoid the official mental disadvantages is that characters tend to settle in over time, and the original set of disadvantages tend to be inappropriate.”

To which I would add that mental disadvantages, because they are slapped down on a sheet before you begin to inhabit your character, usually get forgotten anyway. I’ve lost track of the number of times players have said, “Oh, I forgot to tell you I have Claustrophobia. I probably should have mentioned that in the mines back there,” or, “Would my PTSD flashbacks have had any effect when we had that desperate gunfight three sessions ago?”

So my ruling from now on is that nobody will get points for mental disadvantages. Bad traits are part of the fun of playing the character. They’re their own reward; you shouldn’t get points for them. And in any case, characters need to be free to change, otherwise we’re allowing the gaming side of the hobby to smother the roleplaying.

The exercise of their power

A while back I ran a few excerpts from The Mage of Dust and Bone, a fantasy novel set in the Fabled Lands world (well, sort of). I wrote the opening chapters for Jamie to continue with, the same process we used for The Wrong Side of the Galaxy, but in this case the thing refused to get up off the slab. Should've used AC instead of DC, I guess.

The lead character was Forge Burntholm, a young wizard, and the first part of the story had some flashbacks to his apprenticeship at Dweomer, which in the novel was not a university town but a crumbling fortress where a single Archmage taught a handful of students. The Fabled Lands literary agent wasn't happy that in those flashbacks I made Forge quite a bully. "He's too unlikeable," he complained. On that subject, I agree with this piece by Celia Walden:

“One of the tricks of the books,” says Anthony Horowitz, “is to make [James Bond] likeable.” I couldn’t agree less. As a philandering, cold-blooded killer, with – as Horowitz accepts – “unfortunate attitudes towards women, gays, Jews and foreigners” – Bond can and should never be made likeable.

My thinking with Mage ran something like this. Wizardry is all about power and force of will, so not addressing the abuse of power would have seemed like a cop-out. JK Rowling has already done the nice version of wizard school so I wanted to show Forge behaving badly in his mid-teens, more out of boredom and the urge to flex his magical muscle than out of malice. Then he is abruptly forced to face the consequences of his behaviour when some magic goes wrong in a very horrible way. The older Forge is already shaken by that experience. He's chastened. He's trying to be a better person - but people don't change overnight, so as the story unfolds he's still struggling with that change rather than suddenly turning into Ron Weasley.

When it comes to fiction, likeability is over-rated. I prefer the interesting characters myself, especially the outrageous ones. We all find Han more compelling than Luke, don't we? Check out this chapter from the novel and then have your say...

SCHOOL DAYS

‘Well? Can you see?’

‘Shush.’

Forge balanced on the thick slab of ice over the top of the rainwater barrel and peered through the tavern’s bottle-paned window. The glass was steamed up, but he could see a mop of carroty hair among the youths pressed shoulder-to-shoulder by the fireside.

He grinned down at Bartholomew. ‘He’s there.’

Kim was standing a little way off, half pretending she wasn’t with them. ‘Let’s go back. It’s cold out here.’

‘Go back, go back,’ mocked Bartholomew in a sing-song voice. ‘Try wearing thicker drawers next time.’

Forge jumped down with a muffled crump. The snow was deep-piled, powdery dry and greenish-white in the light from the window. He blew out a big cloud of steam. ‘What’s it going to be this time?’

‘Hanging around here is stupid,’ complained Kim. ‘I’ve got three chapters and a rune diagram to get through for tomorrow.’

‘That’s theory. Nothing beats practice,’ sneered Bartholomew.

There was a drunken bellow from inside, a half-hearted attempt to get a song going that soon petered out. They heard jeers of laughter.

‘Was that Ruggins’s tuneless warbling?’ said Bartholomew, cocking a hand to his ear. ‘Or was it the howl of a weasel giving birth to a warthog? Either way, I think it calls for…’

‘For punishment,’ said Forge.

‘My very thought. Corrective punishment. Severe and memorable punishment.’

‘A lesson never to be forgotten.’

Kim shuffled her feet. ‘Just leave him alone. Why have you got to torment him?’

‘For the same reason that you are standing here with us, Monksilver,’ said Bartholomew, ‘and not scribbling away at your prep. Boredom. The need for amusement amid the scholastic tedium. And the natural desire to administer justice to a red-headed yokel with a face like a fishwife’s backside.’

After first arriving at Dweomer, the apprentices had not taken long to learn what the local youths thought of them. The ringleader, Galt Ruggins, a farmer’s lad a little older than they were, had forced Forge and Bartholomew into the ditch as he brought his pigs to market one day. ‘Bookworms,’ he said with a guffaw, kicking mud at them. The smirk on his face, milky pale under thick red shock of hair, was full of spite.

For a while they put up with his bullying, and found ways to avoid going into the village. Forge had been the first to grasp the practical applications of the magic they were learning. They bent over their books and workbench with even keener interest. After a while they tried out a spell that caused seagulls to gather over Galt Ruggins’s head whenever he went out, swooping and shrieking. It went on for a week. Forge and Bartholomew found him sitting on a bench outside the village, his clothes fouled with the birds’ droppings. The gulls had settled all around to stare at him with their wide blank eyes.

‘It must be your ridiculous hair, Ruggins,’ said Bartholomew. ‘If I were a bird, I’m sure I’d want to void my bowels on you.’

‘Go,’ Forge had added, and the gulls took off at once.

Galt had sat stunned, the way an animal kept in a cage won’t always bolt as soon as the door is opened. Until that moment when he saw the birds fly away he had no notion that the apprentices were the cause of his misery.

Forge leaned in close. ‘I said go.’

Galt jumped up and hurried away up the high street, and Forge and Bartholomew looked at each other in mutual delight of their power.

After that, Galt Ruggins became a convenient test subject for any new magic they learned. A diabolic voice spoke from the tavern hearth one night and described his secret wishes and fantasies, to the great amusement of the other drinkers. There was a period when milk would spoil in any house where he slept, forcing his parents to put his bed out in the barn. He suffered two weeks of uncontrollable flatulence, a curse that was only lifted when he agreed to run through the village naked on market day.

The apprentices revelled in the exercise of their power and would swagger through the village, smiling like young wolves at the sight of older boys scurrying out of their way. As for Galt, he grew morose and bitter. He took out his feelings of impotence on his friends, acquiring a reputation for sullen and unpredictable violence.

Once he snapped. Insulted by Forge as he came into the village on his family’s best mare, he tried to ride him down. By now the apprentices didn’t need to cook up curses in a laboratory. They had spells ready at their fingertips. Forge stepped contemptuously aside and ensorcelled the horse with a gesture and a word. Eyes rolling, spraying spittle, with Galt clinging terrified to its back, it thundered up to the cliffs and galloped along the very edge as if pursued by hounds from hell. On it went until Galt lost sight of the village. On one side was the wind-flattened grass, on the other a sheer drop to the pounding foam of the waves hundreds of feet below.

After screams for help, Galt tried threats. He felt sure the apprentices were watching him from affair. He grew angry, then pleading, then too frightened to make any sound at all. Finally he could take it no longer. He threw himself clear, breaking his wrist in the process, and the horse went straight over the cliff.

‘You didn’t need to kill it.’ Forge remembered Kim’s accusing glare. What had his answer been? He remembered it now with terrible clarity, with a stab of shock that physically hurt. He’d laughed.

‘I think,’ Bartholomew was saying, ‘boils this time.’

‘Interesting choice,’ said Forge, as if picking a dish from a menu. Kim tut-tutted.

‘I’ve noticed Ruggins has had his doltish bovine eye on that blonde milkmaid at Undertree Farm,’ Bartholomew went on. ‘No doubt his intentions are squalid. Once his face comes out in a great mass of angry red boils, his hopes of a stolen kiss decrease dramatically.’

‘I like it. Preserving the girl’s honour and giving Ruggins a suitable rebuke for his gross animal lusts at the same time.’

‘Quite. Anything we can do to prevent the Ruggins bloodline from propagating itself is a worthy exercise of our talents.’

‘You’re both disgusting,’ said Kim. ‘Do you think this is what the Arch Mage teaches us magic for? To persecute ordinary folk for our amusement?’

Bartholomew was suddenly serious. ‘You’ve learned nothing, Monksilver, if you think he cares a jot what we do to the common herd. He’d raise his finger and wipe out a kingdom, and then get a sound night’s sleep.’

‘That’s not true. Magic is about having a feeling for everything around you. You can only become a true wizard when you know you’re part of everything.’

‘So?’ spat back Bartholomew, relishing an argument, ‘My toenails are part of me, and I don’t mind cutting them.’

There was a scuffing noise from the roof. Bartholomew and Kim, who had been circling each other as they argued, stepped out further into the street. That saved them. Forge stayed where he was under the eaves and looked up in time to see a heavy ledge of snow come crashing down on his head.

He was on his back. He couldn’t breathe and he felt a stinging, suffocating lump in his throat. He coughed out snow and struggled up, shaking off Kim’s hand.

In the door of the tavern stood half a dozen of the local youths. They hung back nervously but their eyes bright with excitement. One of them was carrying a jacket stuffed with straw and topped off with a bundle of red hair.

‘That’s what you do with bookworms,’ came a laugh from above. ‘Bury ‘em in the snow.’

‘Ruggins.’ Forge narrowed his eyes. ‘What a costly prank this is going to be.’

He raised his arm, already swirling with a web of shadows that he intended to implant forever inside Galt’s eyes. But Kim surprised him by stepping in the way. Galt gave a sudden bark of nervous laughter, apparently surprised not to have been blasted off the roof already, and dropped out of sight on the other side.

The youth with the straw dummy flung it away as it burst into flames. ‘Back inside, you!’ snarled Bartholomew, slamming the tavern door on them with another spell.

‘Leave it,’ said Kim.

‘Get out of the way,’ said Forge, walking past her and swiftly down the alleyway to the other side of the tavern. Just visible in the bar of lamplight from an outlying cottage, Galt was already fifty yards away and running for home.

‘You could just let him go.’ But she said it wearily, more to herself than to Forge, seeing from the light in his eyes that it was futile.

Bartholomew also wanted nothing to do with it now, but for different reasons. ‘We can catch up with him another time. Let him stew for a bit, Forge. Then, in a week or two, he’ll wake up with a face full of boils.’

‘Boils?’ Forge looked at him with a feral grin. ‘We’re way beyond that. I’m going to do something permanent. Something that’ll remind him of this evening for the rest of his life.’

He brushed the remaining snow off his sleeves. Ruggins was out of sight in the darkness but Forge wasn’t in any particular hurry now. He set off at a measured tread across the white-blanketed field and Kim and Bartholomew watched him go in uneasy silence.