Heart of Ice - the ultimate edition

The deluxe edition of Heart of Ice is coming, and as these samples show it really is deluxe. You can get on board the crowdfunding now with just one week to go. Seeing as the colour hardback edition of The Walls of Spyte nowadays gets advertised for sale at $1500 up, it's an investment as well as a treasure.

A big thank you to Polish gamebook readers

I wrote Heart of Ice nearly thirty years ago, and it's still my own favourite of all my gamebooks. So it was really wonderful to hear that the Polish edition, currently crowdfunding, has already raised €13,000 and it still has three weeks to run.

"Where do you get your ideas from?" I'm sometimes asked. And in this case I can tell you. It was in Oxford in December of '76, as I beheld the majestic buildings of Christ Church softly lambent under an icy black star-filled sky. At the Mountains of Madness converged from one side of my imagination, It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World from the other, and a week or so later I was running it as an Empire of the Petal Throne adventure for a score of friends from school and college.

For the gamebook version, fifteen or so years later, I had to switch the story to my own setting (Tekumel rights not being available) and the ice age world of the 23rd century leapt obligingly straight onto the page, no doubt with a little mental midwifery courtesy of Jack Vance, Robert A Heinlein and Arthur C Clarke. Little did I know as I wrote that book that it would still be bringing pleasure to readers all these years later. So once again: thank you, Polish gamers!

 

Some say in ice

That's the trailer for a new Polish-language edition of Heart of Ice that's now crowdfunding -- and fast; it hit its initial target within hours of launch. Backers can get not only a fine edition of the book (one of the stretch goals is for full-colour illustrations) but extras including maps of the world in the frozen 23rd century, bookmarks that double as character sheets, and even a universally coveted Compass Society credit card. In the post-apocalyptic setting of the book, that's better than gold.

Fantasy with bite

A lot of what goes under the banner of fantasy isn't really all that fantastical. Quaint half-timbered taverns filled with half-elf barmaids and dwarves with Scottish accents where you go to be given your latest quest. My own experience of these games is that the players tend to sit knitting or stroking the cat while saying things like, "My halfling thief asks the innkeeper if he's seen any strangers passing through." There will be a dark lord, and an item you must destroy to defeat them and fix everything. It's made up, but it's not exactly fantasy. Where's the wonder? Where's the weird?

Good fantasy isn't cosy. It isn't a safe space. It takes you somewhere new and unpredictable. In Wightchester you're sealed up in a walled city where the plague is turning people into undead. What are you going to do now? "My drow ranger-witch hides in the shadows and listens for rumours" isn't going to cut it. No theme-park retread of Tolkien's tropes, this, but a dark and exciting roleplaying setting that'll immerse you like quicksand.

The crowdfunding has just hours to go. If you're looking for real fantasy, drop the knitting and get over there now.

Dawn of the plague-ridden undead

I'm not usually a big fan of zombies (except in a Voodoo context) but I could revise that opinion for 17th century plague-ridden zombies. James Desborough's Wightchester: Prison City of the Damned starts with the closed-up streets of the Great Plague and runs with that to its sanity-rending beyond-all-logic conclusion. 

Wightchester is a low-fantasy horror campaign that sounds perfect for gamers who play to discover the story. As the Indiegogo description explains, this is "a setting where blades and gunpowder are more important than magic, and where the magic that does exist demands a price. Not a hex crawl, or a conventional adventure, but a free-roaming setting where you can decide what you want to do. Do you want to try and escape? Do you want to create a fortified place to live within the prison? Do you want to clear the entire city of the undead and earn your release? Good luck with any of those." 

You've got till the end of September to back it. And after the last eighteen months of real life, what could be more cathartic?

December will be magic again

New news: French publisher Alkonost is crowdfunding editions of Heart of Ice, Fabled Lands and Cyclades by Emmanuel Quaireau and Patrick Fontaine. 

Jamie and I are currently working on his Vulcanverse project (more on that tomorrow) which draws very loosely on Greek myth, so we ought to take a look at Cyclades ourselves.

You can reserve your copies by backing the books here. Meanwhile, any excuse for Kate Bush:

Patrons wanted for the Jewelspider expedition

My last outing on Patreon didn't work out so well. That was for Mirabilis: Year of Wonders, the project dearest to my heart. In retrospect it was perhaps overly optimistic to think I could fund hundreds of pages of full-colour comic book art through the kindness of strangers, especially since the only publisher of Mirabilis (to date) managed to lose all the copies of Book 2 in a lay-by somewhere between Bosnia and Britain.

Oh well, that's spilt milk. The latest challenge is more achievable (maybe), namely how to fund some top-notch artwork for the Jewelspider rulebook I'm working on. I'd like to get pictures by Jon Hodgson and Tancred Dyke-Wells, among others. And not just covers and a few interiors, either. I'm going to need maps and filler art (to make the layout work) and a tidier character sheet than this one.

If push comes to shove I can do the maps and some sketches myself, but that'll look worse than first edition Dungeons & Dragons so fingers crossed. If you happen to be flush with cash and want to throw some of it at the Jewelspider project, the Patreon page is here. If not, share the link with rich friends and relatives and I'll thank you forever, even if they won't. (According to Amanda Palmer, the secret of raising money is simply to learn the knack of asking people to give it to you, but I suspect I'd also have to marry Neil Gaiman to make that one work.)

What do you get as a patron? Other than the warm glow of satisfaction, you'll have access to sneak peeks at the rules. Like this sorcery phylum, for instance:

Illumination – there are various ways to summon a magical light, each with its own advantages and drawbacks: 

• Faerie motes accompany you and may even dart ahead to point out hidden things, but are capricious and will shun holy people and places. 

• Corpse light (Necromancy) or St Elmo’s Fire (Fire mastery) covers you and may affright superstitious companions. 

• Moonbeams can be captured in a globe and can be directed in a soft beam or dimmed at will, but you need to keep a hand free to hold the globe. 

• Flames (Fire mastery again) are very bright, which is useful at close quarters but can prevent you noticing things outside the circle of light. 

• A mirror or piece of glass can be induced to release daylight that fell on it at earlier times. 

• A glow can be awakened in the heart of a precious gem. 

• A hand of glory sheds a light that only the caster can see and has other powers besides: opening locked doors and preventing those asleep from waking. It requires special ingredients: the hand of a murderer cut from the gallows, the hair of a suicide (as a wick) and fat from an unbaptised child. Needless to say, constructing such a thing is considered diabolism by the Church and punishable by death. 

Perhaps the simplest option is to Enhance an ordinary lamp so that even a strong wind won’t blow it out, although note that lamps don’t give off a great deal more light than a few candles would.

At least the pressure of seeing a few dollars trickling in each month will spur me to get on and finish the rules, even if it never tots up to enough to pay for a full-page illustration. However, having included at least one link to Wikipedia above, let me add that they too are looking for donations and their need is greater, and their cause far worthier, than mine. So if you only do one act of patronage this month, make it Wiki not me. Though I won't grumble if you want to make it both.

A farewell to alms

There's been talk recently of financial trouble at Megara Entertainment. The founder, Mikaël Louys, launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise funds to pay company bills, noting that if the money wasn't raised then Megara would shut down at the end of February. The crowdfunding was cancelled today some way short of its target. Based on what Mikaël has said on Facebook and on the Megara site, that implies the company may now close unless a new investor comes along in the next few days.

Why this particularly matters to Fabled Lands players is that five hundred of you pledged for hardback copies of The Serpent King's Domain. I don't know what's going to happen about those. Were they ever printed? If so, at least one other games company based in Cannes has offered to take the stock and arrange to ship them to the backers, though they report that they haven't been able to get Mikaël on Skype yet to discuss it. And if the books weren't printed -- well, it seems that the Kickstarter money has gone, and that Megara now doesn't have the means to fulfil those orders.

Jamie and Paul Gresty and I signed a couple of hundred bookplates which we sent to Megara a while ago -- but if Megara has no funds left then presumably neither the hardbacks nor the bookplates will get sent to the backers. It's a bad situation.

I wish I had better news. I wish I had any news. Unfortunately Jamie and I don't even have access to backers' contact details, so we can't let them know if any solution is found. Michael J Ward, creator of Destiny Quest, has had to do some ducking and diving to get DQ4 to backers, I believe, so Fabled Lands wasn't the only project to get hurt by the fallout. If I'm able to find out more, or if I learn of any chance of a solution, you'll hear it right here.

But in the midst of all that, and despite the public slurs Mikaël has directed at me and Jamie, and the fact that I'm not at all thrilled to see he has put works by me and Jamie, Gary Chalk, Russ Nicholson and others on Megara's Patreon page without our permission, I'll say goodbye to Megara  (if indeed it does close down at the end of the month) with some faint sadness. The gamebook world is tiny enough without a publishing company going out of business. And to give Mikaël his due, if he hadn't reached out to Fabled Lands LLP several years ago it's unlikely there would have been Kickstarters for The Way of the Tiger or Fabled Lands book 7. So it's a shame it all went sour, and it's particularly a blow for those backers who never got the books they pledged for, and for the creators whose work is being used on Megara's Patreon page -- but let's also remember the better times. C'est la vie.

A fresh start for the Year of Wonders

I resisted Facebook for the longest time. It’s not that I don’t like tech, I just don’t care for people that much. (Only kidding. I like people just fine. It’s the pet photos and soccer chat I wanted to avoid.)

Finally I’ve had to succumb, and the reason is that Leo Hartas and I needed to set up a Facebook page for our comics saga Mirabilis: Year of Wonders (If you need a this-meets-that, try Tintin hunts Fantastic Beasts with a soundtrack by Danny Elfman).

This is part of our big push to get the Mirabilis project moving again. The story was originally serialized in weekly British anthology comic The DFC, published by Random House. When The DFC folded, our story was left unfinished but our rights were tied up in a complicated contractual tangle. It took me months of increasingly desperate negotiation to find a way out of that limbo, made all the more fraught by the fact that none of the people involved in the mess would even return my calls. Luckily I knew Philippa Dickinson, the original publisher of Dragon Warriors and one of the truly nicest people you could hope to work with, who by now had risen to be the head of RH’s children’s publishing division. She pulled strings with the powers that be and got me and Leo our rights back.

Thus unfettered I could stop chewing my nails, but it was still far from plain sailing. We secured a publisher for Mirabilis, but though they did a beautiful job of the production they failed to get copies into any shops. I had to lug a couple of bags stuffed with copies to the Gosh! Comics store in London – if you bought one of those, hang onto it like a Penny Black with Queen Vic in a hipster beard, because they were almost the only copies that ever saw the light of day. The rest, I hear, went astray between the printer (in Bosnia) and the distribution warehouse (in Lancashire) and may now be propping up wobbly café tables somewhere in Germany.

So, back to the drawing board. A comics publisher reached out, but the deal they offered was like a handshake from Don Corleone. We were expected to sign over all rights in perpetuity to them, even though there was no obligation for them to keep the book in print. After the epic struggle with Random House there’s no way Leo and I could accept terms like that. As a creator, all you have is your work. You can't let other people lock you out of it.

What about Random House themselves? Well, Philippa had retired by this point, and the mildest way to put it is that having escaped the clutches of the contract we didn’t really have a lot of friends there. We were in our gulag and, at any other time in history, there we might have stayed. But this is the 21st century, right - with social media and crowdfunding and shit. So Leo and I have spent the last few weeks getting ready for a full and concerted relaunch of this mighty fantasy saga. Our plans include:

• a Patreon page where aficionados can come and pledge as little as $1 a month to help fund new instalments. Pages of the comic go up there Mondays and Fridays with higher-level backers getting access to backstage blog pieces and other goodies.
• a new website where everyone can read the comic absolutely free – just a little way behind the paid-up supporters on Patreon, who also get higher-res versions of the art.
• the aforementioned Facebook page where you can get updates on Mirabilis and any other books, comics, movies or games that we thing might interest you.
• a Twitter account with daily instalments of the comic.

And we’re toying with the idea of a Kickstarter to fund a Mirabilis gamebook. Or app. Maybe a boardgame. Possibly all three and - I dunno, a roleplaying game too? The Patreon backers may get a say in that. The exciting thing is that it's a community where everyone gets a voice.

Here’s the thing. We could really use your support – which is, after all, the whole point and rationale of what we’re trying to do now. We’re bypassing the publishers and distributors and going straight to the people whose opinion and backing count most. That’s you, we hope. The readers. Already we've got backing from Jason Arnopp, the 21st century's Stephen King, from the Jedi Master of gamebooks Stuart Lloyd, and from musician, artist & game designer Frazer Payne, among others. Good company to be in, and an absolutely priceless vote of confidence when we're starting a new venture like this. Thanks, guys.

If you can spring for a few dollars to actually fund the work, then you’re our BFFs till the sun dies – but even if not, a like on Facebook costs nothing and can really help boost interest. You never know, this could be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Eternal Escape

If gamebooks have a future, works like Metahuman Inc and 80 Days point to that future being in digital format. With all the advantages you can see why. It's easier to give readers a free sample. The device keeps track of any stats and variables so you can stay immersed in the story. The text can adapt to the choices you make in a way that a print gamebook, contrained by the physical limit on the number of paragraphs, cannot do.

This week we got wind of a new digital gamebook called Eternal Escape that's being funded on Indiegogo. You can read more about it here and play the demo here.

Evgeny Nesterov and his development team promise a 2000+ section adventure with a strong story hook. You wake up in a dank cell. Your memory has gone; you don't know who you are or how you got here. There's a 400-year-old statue with your face. And among the characters wh might help, hinder or eat you is a seven-foot ant called Tal. Who are you going to trust? It sounds like "Alice Cooper in Wonderland"! The campaign runs just one month, so jump over there and see for yourself.

You wait years for a Lone Wolf crowdfunding campaign...

No, not that Lone Wolf project, this one. This one has Gary Chalk art. Oh, but so did the other one. I'll tell you the first thing that sprang to mind:

"Nigel gave me a drawing that said eighteen inches. Now, whether or not he knows the difference between feet and inches is not my problem. I do what I'm told."

"But you're not as confused as him, are you. I mean, it's not your job to be as confused as Nigel."

Actually it's really simple. The other crowdfunder was for a new series of gamebooks set in Magnamund but not starring Lone Wolf. This, on the other hand, is a boardgame and it does star Lone Wolf, along with other famous characters from the books such as Giak Kootak and Rotzon the Cener. (I think that's him below with the big old book and the curtain rod.)

Confused? Maybe you should read Richard S Hetley's guest post about the Lone Wolf Boardgame on Lloyd of Gamebooks. That will explain everything. Go ahead, I'll wait.

What makes this special enough to be worth your hard-earned shards? Well, even if you're not a fan of the Lone Wolf gamebooks, any boardgame designed and illustrated by Gary Chalk is a must. Here's the guy who created the look and feel of Magnamund, who shaped the imagination of a generation of tabeletop gamers with his Games Workshop artwork & game design, and who has illustrated scores of beautiful books. On top of that he's a genuine gaming enthusiast himself with that rare combination: passion and talent, both turned up to 11.

For this Kickstarter campaign, Gary has teamed up with Megara Entertainment, who we might have mentioned before, and Greywood Publishing, the publishers of the very short-lived Fabled Lands RPG. The campaign has just one week left to run, and with your help it can still reach its target. Find out all the details here.

The wisdom of crowds

Ulule is one of those crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter or Indiegogo where a publisher can raise investment for new projects from the people who are best placed to judge whether there's a market: the customers themselves. And this month, Megara Entertainment are looking to fund a French edition of the Sokara supplement to Greywood's Fabled Lands RPG.

Megara have set a total target of €1500, and as I write this they are more than a third of the way there. Depending on how much you invest you can get a bunch of goodies to thank you for being one of champions of Sokara. For more information, take a look at the Sokara page on Ulule. Don't delay - the offer only lasts until May 17.