The Horned Ram

2025 is the 40th anniversary of Dragon Warriors, and we can trust Red Ruin Publishing to mark that with some of their usual high-quality scenarios and gamebooks. Here's The Horned Ram, a solo adventure for an assassin, by Paul Partington. You're out of cash and out of luck when you get offered the job of 'reclaiming' a lost gem that may be in the hands of a religious group. What could possibly go wrong..?

Growing up in the heart of the Vulcanverse

If you've seen any of the recent posts, you already know that Vulcanverse is a solo role-playing game set in an open world, meaning that you can play the gamebooks in any order, coming back to earlier books whenever you travel to the region they cover. Instead of a single storyline there are virtually unlimited adventures. 

Although it's nominally the fifth and last in the series, Workshop of the Gods is a good place to begin your adventures. You’ll have the advantage of having grown up in the city, so you’ll be familiar with the streets and landmarks, and also there are characters who will task you with quests right from the start. Not only that, they'll give you some hints to help you on your way.

Any one book in the series is enough to get started, as in Fabled Lands, and other books allow you to explore more of the Vulcanverse. You will keep the same adventuring persona throughout the books – starting out as a novice but gradually gaining in power, wealth, prestige and experience throughout the series.

OK, why don't we run through the rules and then you can try it for yourself by launching into the first part of the adventure...

ADVENTURE SHEET
Your Adventure Sheet lists everything you’ll need to keep track of while playing. There's an online Adventure Sheet you can use, but don’t fill it in yet. That will happen as you begin your adventure.

ATTRIBUTES
You have four attributes whose values typically range from −1 to +2 as you’re starting out. You will discover your attribute scores as you play. The attributes are:

• CHARM: Your understanding of people and their motives. 
• GRACE: How agile, supple and quick you are. 
• INGENUITY: Cunning and reasoning, and your ability to think on your feet. 
• STRENGTH:  Physical might and endurance.

The maximum possible innate score in an attribute is +5. If you are at maximum and are told to add to your score, it has no effect.

Items that augment attributes
There are items you can acquire that boost your attributes while you have them. These are:

You can only use the bonus from one such item at a time. So if you had a laurel wreath that gives CHARM +1 and a golden lyre that gives CHARM +2, you’d only get the CHARM bonus from the latter. Similarly, two laurel wreaths still only give you a +1. 

An item can augment your attribute score above the innate limit of +5. If you have a STRENGTH score of +5 and you possess an iron spear, your total STRENGTH bonus when making a roll counts as +7.

Making an attribute roll
Attribute rolls are made to see if you succeed at a task. These are rolls of two dice with a difficulty that you must equal or beat to succeed. For instance, you might be told: ‘Make a STRENGTH roll at difficulty 7’. You roll two dice, add your STRENGTH score (including the modifiers for any one possession that boosts STRENGTH) and to succeed you need to get 7 or more.

Example: You are at the bottom of a cliff. To climb it you need to make a GRACE roll at difficulty 5. You roll two dice and score 4. Your GRACE attribute is −1 but luckily you have winged sandals which give a +2 GRACE bonus, so your modified GRACE is +1, just enough to make the roll a success.

A roll of double 6 (‘boxcars’) is always a success regardless of difficulty. A roll of double 1 (‘snake eyes’) is always a failure regardless of modifiers.

WOUNDS
The Adventure Sheet has a box labelled Wound. This is unticked at the start of the adventure. From time to time you may be asked to put a tick in it. You only have one Wound tick at a time; if you’re asked to tick the box when it is already ticked, you don’t add another. While the Wound box is ticked you have injuries, and must deduct 1 from any attribute roll until the box is unticked. 

If you have an item such as tincture of healing that allows you to untick the Wound box, you cannot use it to avoid taking a wound, only to remove a wound after you have taken it. So if you do take a wound, apply any effects listed and when you turn to the next section you can then use the item to heal.

SCARS
You begin with no scars, but may acquire them from lasting injuries or from returning from the afterlife. Scars are a mixed blessing. Many people will shun you because of them, but others will admire or fear you more.

POSSESSIONS
Possessions are always marked in bold text, like this: iron spear. If you come across an item marked like this you can pick it up and add it to your list of possessions.

You can carry up to twenty possessions at a time. If you come across an item you want when already at your limit, you’ll have to discard something to make room. There are places in the Vulcanverse where you can leave possessions and come back for them later.

MONEY
You can carry any sum of money (measured in a coinage called pyr). You’ll discover as you play whether you have any money to start off with.

GLORY
Glory starts at 0 but will grow as you perform deeds that increase your renown. With high Glory you will be recognized as a hero and given more respect by those you meet.

CODEWORDS
There is a list of codewords at the back of each book. Sometimes you will be told you have acquired a codeword. When this happens, put a tick in the box next to that codeword. If you later lose the codeword, erase the tick.

TITLES
Titles record the achievements you have earned, marking you as the champion of a city, protector of a temple, admiral of a fleet, or even a monarch. You will be told when you acquire a title.

BLESSINGS
If you fail an attribute roll, you can use up a blessing to roll the dice again. You can only do that once per roll, so you cannot use a second blessing to get another reroll if the first one fails.

You can have up to three blessings at a time. You start the adventure with no blessings. Usually the place to get blessings is at a shrine or temple, but you may find other opportunities to acquire them.

COMPANION
As you travel the Vulcanverse, you will sometimes meet people who are willing to journey with you. You can have one companion at a time. When you pick up a new companion you must remove your current companion, if any, from the Companion box. You can also part company with a companion at any time just by deleting their name from the box. You do not have a companion at the start of the adventure. 

CURRENT LOCATION
You’ll use this box from time to time to keep track of where you are. You will be told when to use it. Whenever you are told to record an entry number in your Current Location box, first delete any number that was already there.

Want to try the intro sequence for yourself? It covers your childhood in Vulcan City, generating your character according to the life choices you make, so by the end of it you're ready to set out on your adventures. You can download that demo here.

Comforts and joys

When I was a teenager, the BBC used to show ghost stories at Christmas, continuing a tradition that goes way back beyond Dickens. It's worth keeping such things going, and to that end here's a spooky yarn by the late Paul Berry called The Sandman. No, not the one you're thinking of; that's hours and hours of TV, this is just nine brilliant minutes. Martin (McKenna, who drew the card above) would've loved it.

And just to make sure you're up to date with the freebies we've shared on previous Christmas posts:

"A Wrong Turning" (comic)

Castle of Lost Souls (gamebook; White Dwarf version)

Heart of Ice (gamebook)

Heroquest 1: The Fellowship of Four

Heroquest 2: The Screaming Spectre

Heroquest 3: The Tyrant's Tomb

In the Night Season (gamebook)

Mortal Combat RPG

Survival of the Fittest (boardgame)

Tirikelu RPG

Tirikelu cover art

Tirikelu creature stats

Tirikelu character sheet

And of course Mirabilis: Year of Wonders. See you in 2023.

Seasonal scientific silliness

It hasn't been easy coming up with a seasonal present for the blog this year. My gaming group had no Christmas adventure run by the polymathic Tim Harford, and I've been pretty busy for most of 2021 writing and editing the Vulcanverse books. So here's one I made about thirty years earlier -- a lighthearted little boardgame called Genius. You can get the rules here and the board here. Just don't expect Settlers of Catan.

Should you be thinking of running a Yule special, there are some sound tips on how to do that on the How Heavy This Axe blog. Amongst other suggestions, I agree that ideally it should be part of an ongoing campaign (I can never get into characters designed to throw away) even if, as in our case, that campaign only occurs once or twice a year.

If you've enjoyed anything on the blog and you'd like to get me and Jamie a Yule gift, reviewing one of our books online is always a welcome surprise. (Obviously, more welcome if you actually liked the book, but don't let me influence you.)

Have a happy solstice, Yule, Christmas, or whatever other winter festival you choose to celebrate. And after the uncanned nuttiness of the last few years, may 2022 bring a season of reason.

Kiss kiss bang bang

This year's Christmas scenario (which is not set in Legend; the clue is in the picture) is over on my Patreon page. But if you don't want to shell out for that and all the other stuff to be found there, you can select from the specials of previous years. Tomorrow there's a free boardgame here, and that's followed by a surprise extra on Christmas Eve. Ho ho ho.

Icon of Death

I keep whingeing about how exhausting it is to write the Vulcanverse gamebooks, work on which has taken me most of the year, and meanwhile Red Ruin Publishing have been steadily releasing top-class Dragon Warriors gamebooks with no fuss whatsoever. I feel chastened.

The latest in the series is Icon of Death by David M Donachie, it's completely free, and it's set under the blistering sun of Outremer. Watch out for mirages and forsaken lazars.

"As he smoothly lowered me into the gloom, I held forth my lantern and gazed at the cold, wet stone..."

Also just out and also free: a new Cedric and Fulk adventure, "The Well of All Tears", in a chapbook that also includes pieces on zombie beasts and gallows wood (the material, not the place, though both are ominous).

Mortal engines

For this year's freebie, don't thank me, thank Steve Foster. He's the designer of Mortal Combat, the homebrew RPG that pulled our thinking away from mega-hit dice heroes towards a grittier blood-&-mud style of fantasy that ended up inspiring Dragon Warriors, for one.

Steve has given his blessing to handing out free PDFs of this seminal (if rough-&-ready) work:

• The Mortal Combat rulebook 
• The extremely rare card insert
• Steve's rules addenda

Just so you know what you're in for here, Mortal Combat is as old school as it gets. It's a combat system with spell lists, designed almost entirely for traditional hack-n-slash adventures. There's an implied medieval setting, but no social skills or details, no stealth, no rules for survival or climbing or lore or any of the other few dozen things you might try in a modern game. Back then, if it wasn't covered by the rules then you could do anything that seemed reasonable. Somehow we managed, and there are times when wrestling with GURPS's several hundred skills and perks when I've yearned to strip things right back. Maybe not quite that far back, but almost.

And you can see now why I didn't choose a career as an illustrator. Happy Christmas!

Free gamebooks

OK, don't say I never did anything for you, coz the Critical IF gamebook series is free on Kindle through till Sunday. The four books are diceless, so they actually work pretty well as ebooks (hyperlinked, obviously). Not an offer to be sneezed at, eh?

And come back on Friday for Camelot Eclipsed, a complete roleplaying campaign set in the days after King Arthur's fall. That should awaken the dragon.

Warm heart

You didn't think I'd forget the traditional Christmas freebie, did you? This year it's a fully interactive version of Heart of Ice, coded as a labour of love by Benjamin Fox. You can plunge into a world on the brink of icy apocalypse right here. Ho ho ho.

Oh, and the artwork at the top there is by Tazio Bettin. Looks like a character to be reckoned with. Hands up who'd like to see a Heart of Ice graphic novel.

I asked for ice, but this is ridiculous

I knew if I waited long enough Brexit would give me something to laugh about, and this video is worth the price of -- admission isn't the right word, I guess. The opposite.

If you've been curious about my and Jamie's new gamebook Can You Brexit Without Breaking Britain? now is your chance to try it out as a free online PDF. (Oh, and incidentally if you need to backtrack you can use Alt + left arrow in a PDF just like the Back button in a browser. That's for PCs. There are options for other devices but you don't need me to tell you about those; you've got the internet after all.)

Share the PDF if you like. This book took us a year to write and, although I'm aware most gamebook readers would rather we'd done something with goblins, I think it's kind of important. Possibly the most worthwhile book we've written, in fact. With just six months to go before the UK and the EU part company, we now just want as many people as possible to get the chance to play it. And don't be put off by the sheer mind-crushing horror of Britain's current political fubar. Can You Brexit? may not be quite as laugh-out-loud as the Titanic video, but we've done our best to inject it with plenty of humour along with all the informative stuff.

And the print book is still on sale for another six months if digital gaming just doesn't do it for you:



And finally, as the newscasters used to say, there's this too. Oh, I can see Brexit is going to usher in a whole new era of deliciously bitter satire:

Almost too good to be true

If I told you there was a definitive history of computer roleplaying games available as a large format 528-page full colour book, you'd have your chequebook out and be asking me for the Kickstarter link, right?

Well, spring is here and with it a flowering of sweet beneficence. Because The CRPG Book Project, authored by divers hands under the editorial aegis of Felipe Pepe, is here right now and it's completely free. Don't believe me? I wouldn't blame you, so go take a look.

If you want a print copy you could probably fix one up for yourself on Lulu. Or just read the book on a tablet and let those colours glow the way they were always meant to.

Khan say fairer than that

When I wrote the second Heroquest book, The Screaming Spectre, there was a fellow at Hasbro whose job was to liaise with me and Corgi Books, also publishers of Dragon Warriors and Knightmare. He didn't like what I was writing -- right from the first page of the manuscript, which bore the title The Singing Skull.

"Singing isn't very threatening," he complained.

"Maybe it is a little, when a skull does it."

"And there's that. How can a skull sing?"

"Er... You know this is fantasy, right?"

You can see our working relationship was off to a good start. His list of objections to the book, which included not enough references to Chaos, clothing descriptions not being "gothic" enough, and too much insistence on magic not being about lists of spells, ended with the doomful words, "It is difficult for me to see how this book could ever be made publishable."

Philippa Dickinson, who ran Corgi, called me up. "What are we going to do?" I told her I'd have a revised version of the manuscript ready in an hour or two. We sent that off and the Hasbro chap decided that it was all okay after all. Which just goes to show that if you're hit with what seems to be a multi-megaton criticism warhead, keep calm and carry on. Most likely your critic is just getting themselves in a panic over nothing much.

By the time I was working on the second book, Games Workshop had dashed in and changed my map of the Heroquest world to something more like their Warhammer map. It wasn't actually the same as the Warhammer one, but it had a lot of place names in common (including the curious "Trullheim" - did they know what a trull actully was?) and also made no sense in relation to the events of the first book, The Fellowship of Four. Go figure. Anyway, if you saw my sketch map of the original Heroquest world, here's the detailed version I did while writing Fellowship:

When I got to the third Heroquest book, The Tyrant's Tomb, which is this year's Xmas freebie, I knew to ladle on the Chaos references, objectionable though it was to have to go along with the lazy Chaos-as-evil theme of the Warquest, or do I mean Herohammer, series when I knew that in Mike Moorcock's original concept it was all so much richer, stranger and genuinely nastier.

Only one part of The Tyrant's Tomb fell afoul of the Hasbro liaison guy. I had a sequence in the novella where the barbarian hero has had to smash his way through a stone wall with a mallet. A serpent rears up and his arms are too weak after all that to wield his sword. So he headbutts the thing, smooshing it against the wall. "This doesn't seem credible," scoffed our man; "what if he kills the serpent with a flying kick instead?"

The headbutt was a sort-of homage to Conan biting a vulture's head off. I don't know about you, but the flying kick just doesn't seem as personal. Nor really what I expect Norse-type barbarians to be doing. So this time, sick of pandering to every whim, I threw my hands up. "We'll just cut that entire scene from the book," I told Philippa. It left the fourth chapter a bit short, but along with the novella you were also getting a 193-section gamebook adventure for your money. Or in this case, entirely free. Grab The Tyrant's Tomb here - and happy Christmas.

Tirikelu: role-playing adventures in the empire of the Petal Throne

Corresponding with Professor M.A.R. Barker in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, I was treated to tantalizing glimpses of “the new Empire of the Petal Throne” he was writing. The original EPT had served its purpose for a while, but my group were moving beyond those D&D-inspired mechanics. This was the era of RuneQuest and The Fantasy Trip. We were hungry for a more authentic experience of Tékumel, so we would pass around the Professor’s letters (he was always incredibly generous with his time) and pick endlessly over comments like this:

“We now have one roll to hit, one to get past the shield, one for damage (minus armour) and if one rolls 0 on a 10-sided die on this last roll, then a critical hit for more damage.”

Years passed. It was taking too long. I began constructing my own set of Tékumel rules from the fragmentary description in the Professor’s letters, like reconstructing an unknown animal from just a few bones.

Finally “the new EPT” appeared. That was Swords & Glory. My group switched for a while, but it was the S&G Sourcebook that was getting dog-eared from use. The other book, the rules, appealed less. “HBS Factors” and “Healing G9s” gave the game a tabletop miniatures flavour rather too far from the freewheeling shared stories we were looking for.

And so I returned to my own rules and began to refine them into the game I had hoped Swords & Glory would be. Those rules were to become Tirikélu.

This was the early 1990s, so it seems a little early to talk of an Old School Revival (not a term I like anyway) but the aim was there. Simplify the system so that the rules didn’t keep tripping up the play. Recapture the evocative magic of those early adventures by cross-pollinating EPT spells with ideas from The Book of Ebon Bindings. Make combat quick to use but more than just the endless dice-rolling of, say, RuneQuest.

I had two eureka moments. First, in a treatise by a duellist from the 17th century (quite possibly Sir William Hope) I came across the concept of “safe fighting”. His contention was that a moderately skilled fighter could, by concentrating on defence, hold off a more skilled opponent who was dividing his attention between attack and defence. In Tirikélu that became the principle of full- and half-actions. It seemed almost too simple on paper, but in practice we found it allowed for rich tactical choices.

Also I wanted to avoid hit location and lots of book-keeping, but not simply to revert to the amorphous pudding of hit points of D&D. So taking damage above a certain percentage of your hits can reduce your skill, and may require a check to stay conscious, but you don’t need to keep a tally of how much damage each wound caused. It’s all handled at the point the wound is taken.

Nowadays there are quite a few role-playing games where you make a detailed decision about what you’re trying to do, then wade through pages of rules to find your chance of doing it. (GURPS, I’m looking at you.) Tirikélu works best if you keep it abstract till after you roll the dice. “He’s going for a full attack.” “I’m going for a full parry.” Once you resolve that, you’re free to put any narrative interpretation you like on the result. It flows faster that way and, with imaginative players, fights feel agreeably cinematic.

Well, here it is – as complete a version of Tirikélu as you’re ever likely to see. I know, I know; it seems like there’s a new Tékumel RPG every couple of years. Who needs yet another? But many people tell me that Tirikélu is their preferred choice, and you know what? It’s mine too. And it is dedicated, as so much of my work is, to the genius, generosity and humanity of Professor M.A.R. Barker. And on top of that, it’s absolutely free and comes with a whole bunch of scenarios, campaigns and source material.

Get Tirikélu as a free PDF HERE. (Or download the super hi-res 45 Meg version here, which I have also set up so that you can print yourself a copy at cost - no profit to me, and strictly for personal use; no resales, please.) It turns out the rules of the Tekumel Foundation don't allow me to do that set-up work for you even as a non-profit thing. So if you want a print copy you'll have to do it yourself. Sorry about the faff, but it'll only take you about fifteen minutes, and I've written this checklist to guide you through Lulu step by step.

You can find Tirikelu creature stats here. And for even more scenarios, try Michael Cule's introductory adventure "Welcome to Jakalla", Dermot Bolton's espionage tale "Crystal Clear", Bob Dushay's military mission for pre-gen characters "Behind Enemy Lines", and David Bailey's high-stakes scenario "The Society of the Resurgent Octagon".

Fellowship

When I was first asked to write a novella to tie in with Heroquest (no, not HeroQuest, which I would have preferred) I came up with the idea of four round-robin narrators vaguely inspired by Jack Vance, Bret Easton Ellis, the Beowulf poet, and Terry Pratchett respectively. And before you raise a very legitimate objection, I did say vaguely.

I don't recall there being a Heroquest world at the time I wrote the first book, so I created part of one and drew my own map of it. By the time I was asked to write the second book, Games Workshop had designed their own version of the world, which included some of the place names from my novella but with a quite different geography "loosely based on the Warhammer world" as it said in the front. I just mention that because if you refer to the map from the second book while reading the first, you will see that the route the characters take makes no sense. One view at the time was, "Well, it's for ten-year-olds," but I can tell you that when I was ten that sort of thing would've annoyed the hell out of me.

As well as the novella, the book The Fellowship of Four included a mini-gamebook, "In the Night Season", and that's this year's Christmas freebie. Grab it now here while stocks last.

Somebody also created an actual HeroQuest set-up based on the novella, here. And while we're about it, an early Christmas freebie was the second Heroquest book, The Screaming Spectre, and if you missed that 'tis the season to be jolly all over again, here.

A gamebook giveaway

As a follow-up to the launch of the large-format Fabled Lands books, Jamie and I have two copies of The War-Torn Kingdom to give away.

All you have to do to win one of these large format books is go here and watch Marco Arnaudo's review of the Critical IF books - which is no hardship because his reviews are brilliantly entertaining and it's worth watching them all.

Every entrant has a chance of winning one of the new books; a 3 on 3d6 should about do it. So a critical, to you GURPS players out there.

But wait - that's not all. The Kindle edition of War-Torn Kingdom is coming out next Friday (Feb 5) and you can pre-order that right here.

And you thought Christmas was over...

Your wish is my command

If you already own a copy of the Virtual Reality gamebook Twist of Fate, a couple of things... First, let me shake your hand. Not a lot of those babies made it out into the world. The original '80s gamebook boom was dying out (well, it was 1994) and this was last in the series, too.

Secondly, I'll understand if you don't want to shell out for the recent Critical IF edition (now titled Once Upon A Time In Arabia) just to read the new prologue. The rest of the book is slightly revised, but substantially no different from the 1994 version.

At the same time, if you're a collector you won't want to miss that new prologue. Here's the solution. You can download a free PDF version right here. That'll give you the prologue, the character sheet and Jon Hodgson's vertiginously amazing new cover. Those were the three wishes you had in mind, right?

Sought is good, but giv'n unsought is better

It's the last day of Christmas (officially, sunset on January 5, which is of course the evening of Twelfth Day by old reckoning) and I thought there ought to be a final gift to mark its passing. So...

In case you want to compare the original White Dwarf version of Castle of Lost Souls with the book (which was sixth in my and Oliver Johnson's Golden Dragon series) you can pick up a PDF version here. I'm issuing this under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs licence. In other words, share it around all you like but please don't take my name off it.

For completists, there's also a non-profit print version available from Lulu. It doesn't have fancy typography or anything but - hey, non-profit, meaning you only pay what Lulu charges to print it.

Okay, better get my decorations taken down and eat that last turkey sandwich. The diet starts tomorrow!

Agreeably scary

It's almost Halloween, and if you're stoking up the fire (or even just upping the brightness on your PC's fireplace screensaver) you may be casting around for delicious fictive chills to run a teasing finger of fright along your spine.

Fans of John Whitbourn's classic Binscombe Tales stories will know that few experiences can be quite so disturbing and at the same time strangely comforting as dropping in at the Duke of Argyll in the company of Mr Oakley, our hapless narrator, and the mysterious Mr Disvan. It's what autumn, imagination, log fires and real ale were created for.

The Binscombe Tales are hard to describe. Possessed of great human warmth and yet often coldly heartless. Sometimes scary but just as often more in the way of startling and thought-provoking. Science fictional except where they're fabulous, fantastic, whimsical, spooky or simply bizarre. Thrilling yet often delightfully leisurely. Terrifying or mind-bending - but always funny with it.

In short, they're the very best of English weird fiction, and if you haven't encountered them yet then you're missing a treat. Fortunately, Jamie and I think ahead so that stuff like the equinox, tax demands and the release of Witcher sequels don't take us by surprise, and this year we had the foresight to prepare an omnibus paperback edition of the complete Binscombe Tales from our Spark Furnace imprint.

Herein you will learn about: the man who spent a lifetime waiting for a bus; the suburban kitchen cupboard that is a gateway to another world; the whispering voices that force a nightclub owner to keep the music turned up loud; the incredible reminiscences of an antique writing desk; and all about the mythic threat lurking under Binscombe's electricity substation. I have previously blogged about the first of those stories, which gave me an authentic shudder as John read it out at a ghost story evening chez Morris, and if you want to try "Waiting for a Bus" then it's available as a free PDF - but only until Halloween.

As well as all twenty-six tales, many of which have garnered awards such as the Year's Best Fantasy, Binscombe Tales: The Complete Series includes a long essay by John Whitbourn in which he reveals that oft-asked authorial secret - to wit, where he gets his ideas from. The whole book is 660 pages so there's no danger of running out of gruesome entertainment before the days start getting longer. I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's the perfect present for those long dark evenings ahead.

The Land Below the Sunrise

Want to pick up a big, sumptuous full-colour map of Akatsurai to go with the newly reissued FL Book 6: Lords of the Rising Sun? Thought so. Well, hit the link and it's yours. Mythic cartography courtesy of Russ Nicholson as usual.

While you're at it, and if that low, low price of free appeals, why not grab a copy of Tetsubo, the Oriental-themed RPG that Jamie and I wrote originally as a Warhammer supplement. We delivered our first draft the day the commissioning editor left Games Workshop, so it ended up cast into the oblivion of a Nottingham filing cabinet. (Or so I like to think. More likely it just lay on the floor under a desk for a year.) It's only a work-in-progress, and it's full of all that Dungeons and Dragons stuff like alignment, ho hum, but there's enough there to get an Akatsurai role-playing campaign going if you're so inclined.

The Oriental RPG I'm really waiting for is Paul Mason's Outlaws, based on the exploits of the Water Margin heroes. I ran my own Kwaidan variant of Outlaws at just about the time I was writing Lords of the Rising Sun, so (as usual) a lot of the ideas for the gamebook came from our role-playing sessions.

Urbane fantasy free on Kindle

A universe away from the Gothic tragedy of Frankenstein, never mind the swashbuckling epic adventure of Fabled Lands, there is the tradition of urbane (sic) fantasy pioneered by Saki and Lord Dunsany. Such stories usually belong to the category that SF academic Farah Mendlesohn calls liminal, in that the weird elements are presented as matter-of-factly as waking up to find deer crossing your back lawn. That wyvern perched on the chimney pot opposite may be no less alarming than a tiger on the loose from the zoo, but it's no more peculiar either. We all know how easy it can be to stray over into the Twilight Zone.

If urbane fantasy is your cup of Earl Grey (dash of lemon if you don't mind, old chap) you can pick up a free Kindle copy of A Minotaur at the Savoy (US edition here) until midnight on Friday. This little volume, as regular readers will know, is a tie-in with the world of the Mirabilis graphic novel, fleshing out the background by means of fifty tall tales woven around the postbag of the Royal Mythological Society. For example:

Dear Prof Bromfield and Dr Clattercut

Recently I was taken by a friend to a restaurant in Fitzrovia. As we were settling down over whisky and cigars after the meal, I glanced at the menu and noticed that the à la carte listed Dodo Véronique. Intrigued as I was, I had by this time already put away a dozen oysters, the onion soup, a smoked haddock dish, two helpings of beef wellington, a lemon soufflé, a plate of almond biscuits, a bottle or two of Chateau Yquem and three large brandies. Also, I’d had a bit of a gyppy tummy earlier in the week, so at that stage I really didn’t feel up to fitting anything else in. I now rather wish I had, as I went for a bit of a walk to see if I could find the place again and there’s no sign of the street. I remember it had a little blue sconce of flame over the door, and a sort of curtain of ivory beads to keep the fog out. My friend has gone on a trip to Venezuela so no use asking him.

Sincerely, Edward Plunkett, The Attican Club, Pall Mall

Dr Clattercut replies: O rara avis in terris!

Prof Bromfield: Latin? You’ll have lost most of our readers right there, old man.

Dr Clattercut: I merely remarked on the pang of missed opportunity. Who knows how long before Mr Plunkett will again find himself in a restaurant with dodo on the menu?

Prof Bromfield: I doubt if there’s honestly any cause for regret. From what I hear, dodo is a tough, gamey sort of fowl. No use cooking it like chicken. Dodo meat is more like what you’d get on a year-old pheasant: tough if served pink, and dry if overcooked. Much more sensible to put it in a curry or a spicy Mexican dish. A Véronique sauce would be all wrong. There’s your explanation, Mr Plunkett – you can’t find the restaurant because it’s gone out of business.

Dr Clattercut: Perhaps the words of another rare bird, the Swan of Avon, will offer some consolation: “Things sweet to taste prove in digestion sour.”