The next wave is the big one

2010. Leo Hartas and I had tickets to the London Book Fair. We weren't expecting much to come of it. If an author steps onto a publisher's stand at the LBF, they look at you like they want to call RentoKil. But we had just published our comic Mirabilis: Year of Wonders on iPad and we were hopeful of showing it to other writers and artists at least.

Fate smiled on us, though. A volcano erupted in Iceland, disrupting air travel, which thinned out the crowds at the LBF. Deprived of the international reps to do deals with, UK publishers had nothing better to do with their time than hold their noses and talk to the authors. (Oh, you thought they'd welcome the opportunity, seeing as we're the people whose work pays their salaries? Ha ha.)

Still, Leo and I thought we had something pretty interesting to show them. We knew they'd have zero interest in the creative content of our Mirabilis app, but there were features they should be taking note of. "Look at how you can buy each issue of the comic in the app," we said. "Those could be the latest titles in your book list. There are share buttons, and if the user signs up they'll get told about new titles in any series they're following."

The publisher's eyes scanned the crowds behind us, probably wondering where that exterminator had got to. "We are publishers, not booksellers," she told us with infinite disdain.

"But this would give you a direct relationship with your customers. You can find out what they like. Sell directly to them. Push additional content like author interviews. Let them know about upcoming releases. All within the app."

She turned away, visibly sickened by having to talk to tradesmen. Mama would never have had to stoop so low. "It is not our business to have a direct relationship with our readers. Publishers do not need 'apps'."

Fast forward only six or seven years and every publisher by then employed bright-eyed tech advisers. "What we want as publishers," they would tell you loftily, "is a direct relationship with our customers."

Too bad they didn't get on that bandwagon when it was setting off. Perhaps if Leo and I had worn suits and pretended scorn for the saps who wrote and drew the comic, the publishers at the 2010 LBF might have listened. But probably not. It's an unchanging trait of British publishers that they will completely refuse to embrace any new trend till it's already passed them by. (A few years earlier, discussing ebooks with another publisher, they'd asked us where they would sell "the discs" with the ebooks on.)

So I'm wondering what trend they're missing right now. It might well have to do with AI. Here's a podcast about that very point featuring Joanna Penn and Thad McIlroy. And if you find that interesting try the episodes on writing with generative AI and using generative AI in book cover design.

Spirit Slayer

Megara Entertainment's new app Spirit Slayer goes on sale today. I haven't had a chance to play it yet, but from the look of the screens I think it will appeal to both CRPG players and gamebook fans. Mikaël Louys had this to say:

"Spirit Slayer is a co-production by Megara Entertainment and game designer and author Paul Blanchot. Art is by Mary Nikol and music by Faiz Nabheebucus. It's a sort of reflexes game mixed with elements of RPG, and is available in both French and English (translated by Paul Gresty)." 

If anybody has tried it, why not tell us in the comments what you thought? I bet we all have spirits we'd love to slay.

Choose Your Own Adventure returns - with a difference

The latest blast-from-the-past interactive story brand to appear on Kickstarter is the granddaddy of them all, Choose Your Own Adventure. But this one's a little different...

First of all, the purpose of the campaign isn't to reissue the books in a new edition, it's to create an all-new app, Your Very Own Robot. And that app isn't going to be text-based. It's an interactive cartoon.

Your first reaction may be, "Isn't that just a simplified point-and-click adventure game?" And so it is. But I would argue that, just like the sabre tooth recurred in evolution many times, adventure games don't have to lie buried in an unmarked grave just because PC and console gaming left them behind. The combination of kids and iPads means a new market.

Kids. That's another interesting point. Gamebook revivals over the last few years have all been targeted at pushing the nostalgia button for thirty- and forty-something readers who remember them first time round. And no doubt those are the customers for Choose 'Toons, as the new series is called, but they'll be buying them to play with their own kids. That gives it a fresh feel and probably a much better chance of surviving, whereas the nostalgia trip soon wears thin.

Interactive story apps are already moving towards more art, less text, in order to broaden appeal. Text is cheap, as this slide from Inkle Studios illustrates. Trouble is, interacting with text is not very engaging once you've got used to playing something like The Witcher. And it's not just kids who feel that way.

All that artwork, though. That's got to be expensive. Well, CYOA are delivering an app, not printed books, so there aren't all the manufacturing and shipping costs. And having built the first app, they could do further titles for (total guess here) around $60,000 each. 17,000 units at $4.99 and they'd break even. That's achievable. And, given that it's a new, fun series with animation and audio, and even the text interaction is done through dialogue with your guide character (that admittedly very unappealing dog), why not 170,000 units?

I'm a little baffled by the way they depict the main character as a sort of blued-out generic "you". What, after a hundred and twenty years of cinema and nearly eighty years of television we can't just accept that audiences are able to identify with a specific character? And the dog - why "Homer"? That's kind of a well-known name in cartoons, and anyway wouldn't "Virgil" make more sense? Still, if there's going to be a new gamebook craze, this could well be what it starts off looking like.

Tin Man has a brand new shine

Lately this blog has been focussing more on print than digital. That's not because I've lost faith in ebooks, just that Fabled Lands LLP is in the process of bringing all our gamebook back catalogue back into print, so page sizes and printing costs have been occupying our attention.

And mostly I think that if an interactive story is going to work in digital form, it needs to be written for that medium. In my digital version of Frankenstein (available for Android now as well as iOS), the interactivity is designed in the form of a conversation with the narrator. The relationship would not be nearly so convincing in a print version, where you'd get to see his Trust and Empathy variables.

So it's interesting to see some revolutionary new changes being hinted at for Tin Man Games's forthcoming Fighting Fantasy titles. Rather than just convert the old text to digital form, Tin Man are giving the books a thorough overhaul (with the authors' blessing) to make them suitable for digital format. Among other things, this means getting rid of nostalgia features like the dice (hooray!) and making the books a lot more visual.

There's some speculation that this revamping is in response to Inkle's recent app-daptation of Steve Jackson's Sorcery, but I suspect the seeds of what Tin Man is doing now were planted earlier, in their visually rich Judge Dredd gamebook app.

My own gripe about dice is not in the clattery cubes themselves - bonkers as those are on the screen of a digital device. It's that when I'm reading an interactive story on iPad, I don't want to be bothered with the mental arithmetic of adding dice scores to combat skills and subtracting defence levels and then dividing by... Sure, the device can do all that for you, but it was never a great part of gamebooks, it was just a necessary evil. At any rate, it fitted with the pace of reading a print book, but feels like steam radio in the era of e-readers.

Putting more graphics into the apps also makes sense. After all, how many text adventure games are released these days? Unless framed within the structure of a novel, interactivity is always going to be more convincing in the context of immediacy that images and audio provide.

I'm also hoping Tin Man will do away with all the "turn to 273" legacy stuff. I should just tap on the option and be taken to the next section. Well, we'll see. It's a bold move, as I see they've already got a comment on the blog saying, "You changed something! How dare you!" (I'm still bracing myself for the snit-storm that'll come when diehards see that the new edition of The Lord of Shadow Keep now has artwork by Harry Clarke.)

The first of the new-style Gamebook Adventures is Appointment with F.E.A.R. and it's due to be released in October.

2013 is "Open Sesame" for gamebooks

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

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

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

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

Frankenstein web demo

After all the recent posts about the writing of my interactive Frankenstein book app, you may like to try it out. And now you don't even need an iPad or iPhone, as development wizards Inkle have put a Frankenstein web demo up on their site. Pop over and have a conversation with Victor about what he's got in that tank - just click where you see the words "Give it a try."

This demo is the sort of thing that publishers ought to be putting up on their websites too, incidentally, not just leaving to developers. But we're only in 2012. Softly, softly.

Meanwhile, if you are iOS-enabled then you can buy the book here.

Frankenstein's monster is on the loose

If you've been dropping in on this blog recently, you can hardly have missed the news about my reboot of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

Is it an app? Well, yes, but "enhanced ebook" might be just as good a term. This is not a thing with sound effects and pop-up play with tricky lighting and swirling fonts. It's a book. A literary experience. You read it, interacting in a choose-your-own type way, only instead of picking which door to open or which dragon to fight, you're having a dialogue with Victor Frankenstein.

What's it like? You don't need to go by my opinion - here's what others have been saying:

"Stunning." - Tim Harford
"Very clever." - Professor John Sutherland
"Nicely done." - Stephen Fry
"A nuanced take on monstrosity... Extremely poignant." - Dr Dale Townshend

But why take their word for it? Anyone with $4.99 and an iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch can see for themselves. And quite a few have already: it's at #2 in UK books and #13 in the USA today. You can get Frankenstein from the App Store in the UK here and US here.

Have a little (poetic) faith

Nobody any longer reads poetry, apparently, so it is now relegated to the role of design feature to make a book look swish. Actually I quite like poetry myself, but that hasn’t stopped me doing my own little act of Philistine vandalism (if that’s not mixing cultures) by plundering some fragments to serve as chapter headings in my interactive retelling of Frankenstein.

If I write out the list of poems I drew on, you can tell the criminal brain of the bunch right away:

• Ovid's Metamorphoses, translated by Dryden et al (1717)
• Auguries of Innocence by William Blake (1803, published 1863)
• Despair by Shelley (early 1800s?)
• Mont Blanc by Shelley (1817)
• Fear in Solitude by Coleridge (1798)
• Childe Harold's Pilgrimage by Byron (1812-1818)

Five of those could have been read by Mary Shelley during her stay at the Villa Diodati, where the original Frankenstein novella was written. It’s highly likely she did read three of them there, at least, seeing as both Percy Shelley and Lord Byron were present too. Coleridge and Dryden she would have read as a child. And then… there’s that Blake snippet:

Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night.

It’s the one that begins, “To see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower.” You see, you did know it already. Quite a modern poem, when you put it alongside the Byron and Shelley, and I think it unlikely that Mary Shelley ever read it, even though Blake knew her mother, having illustrated her book Original Stories from Real Life. It’s a small world, especially if you’re an 18th century London intellectual.

So what if the Muse inconsiderately didn’t introduce those two lines into the domain of artistic culture till a half-century after Frankenstein was published? They seem so perfect as a description as the monster’s fate, and at the same time expressive of the whole idea of fateful choices in an interactive novel, that nothing else would do to open the second part of the book (my version, that is) which tells the monster’s story. Even the original novel is sprinkled with quotations from recent poems by Percy Shelley – contemporary works when Mary wrote the book, no more egregious than lines from Pete Doherty appearing in a videogame. Yet, of course, they could not be there, because the ostensible author is Victor Frankenstein, who died in 1798 or ’99. Since he probably didn’t find a bookshop selling Coleridge’s works near the North Pole, the only one of my choices he could conceivably have been able to quote is the Ovid. And Victor would probably have known it better in the original Latin, the language he falls back on (again, in my version of the novel) when he needs to have a conversation with a doctor in Athens.

Emerson warns us about foolish consistencies. I haven’t had Victor and his friends speak like characters in a Regency novel – mainly because people in the early 1800s didn’t talk that way either, but also with the excuse that it’s mostly a translation from French anyway. You won’t see any wristwatches. The current affairs that occupy their interest are those of the 1790s. The poems, though - those we must see as outside the framework of Victor’s narrative, just like the illustrations and the iOS code in which the app is compiled.

Now, if you really want to take me to task for wilful anachronism, how about Victor’s conversation with an Oxford chemistry professor about the effect of ethyl methanesulphonate on human tissue cultures? Over to you, Dr Tyrell.

A lich you can't scratch

The Keep of the Lich Lord returned from the dead this week as another visually arresting app from Megara Entertainment. If you're a Fighting Fantasy fan, you may remember this book as my and Jamie's contribution to the classic UK gamebook series.

The Megara version comes with new art and new text - I know, because (see below) I never put "a" Cerberus in anything! So, even if you played the original book, it's obviously worth picking up the app for all the new material. I'm told there are over a hundred illustrations, all in full colour. All Megara's excellent work paid off and the app shot up into the charts in both the UK and USA. Oh, and you might like to know that, as an added bonus, Megara has relocated the action from FF's world of Alan to our own Fabled Lands universe!

The Lich Lord app is for iPad and iPhone only, but we're aiming to change that with our future gamebook releases, which will ideally be available on as many platforms as possible: Android, Kindle, Windows, iOS and whatever else we can manage. Big plans. I'll tell you when I know more.

Mirabilis launches on iPhone, Android, Windows Phone 7 and desktop apps

A cross-post today from my Mirabilis comic blog. Mirabilis season one, all 200 full-color pages of it, launches this week on Graphic.ly's multi-platformed storefront. If you've had your nose pressed to the Apple Store window wondering about that iPad, save your money - the new version is out in a month or two anyway, and in the meantime you can not only get Fabled Lands on iPhone, you can now collect all eight issues of Mirabilis on a whole bunch of smartphones and other devices.

Which devices? Well, desktop or laptop for starters. You can get the free Adobe AIR application which really is a nice presentation frame for your comics. Then there are the iPad, iPhone and Android versions - also absolutely free, naturally. And if you prefer to go old school, there's Graphic.ly's web reader that lets you have a look inside all their latest titles and to view the ones you collect on stunning fullscreen view. Setting up your Graphic.ly ID takes a couple of clicks and then you can read your comics on any or all of the supported platforms.

Still not convinced? Okay, well try this: as an introductory offer you can get both Mirabilis #1 and #2 for free. And Graphic.ly offer a whole bunch of other great titles in their online store, many of them free, and all backed up by the kind of extras we're coming to expect in digital comics: creator info, interviews, trailers, character tags and so on. Having just raised a further $3 million investment, Graphic.ly are ramping up to be one of the major forces in the new comics media, and we're very proud to have Mirabilis as part of their 2011 flagship line.

This digital lark, there might actually be something in it, eh? But if you don't think so, hold on a few weeks and, if you live in the UK or Ireland, you'll be able to buy Mirabilis as two deluxe hardcovers.

Now, any choices I've left out..?

Fabled Lands on your phone

News so hot you could cook a roc's egg on it: Megara Entertainment, the development wizards behind the Fabled Lands HD game for iPad, are right at this moment putting the finishing touches to the iPhone version (which will also run on iPod Touch, of course). This will be submitted to Apple tomorrow and should therefore be on sale within a matter of weeks. Building on the roughly 12,000 man-hours of work that went into the iPad app, this version features a completely new UI to fit the smaller screen and of course has all the extra content from the updates to the app over the last month.

Props to Mikael Louys, Roland Derhi, Richard Hetley and the rest of the Megara clan for their amazing job in getting this conversion done in such a short time. They've been working around the clock these last few weeks, hyped up by musical accompaniment from Messrs Clapton and Knopfler, and can now take a well-deserved evening off at their local Thai restaurant. Just don't fall asleep in the tom kha gai, fellas. All that work was because you demanded it, FL fans, so please be sure to give them your support.

This Tin Man's got heart

Gamebooks are alive and thriving in 2011, as you can see from this dramatic trailer for Tin Man Games' upcoming iOS gamebook Catacombs of the Undercity, the fifth in their Gamebook Adventures series that began with An Assassin in Orlandes. The blurb ought to whet your appetite for some serious sword-n-sorcery action:

Captured by one of Orlandes City's most infamous brotherhoods, the Red Hand Guild, you are thrown to the mercy of the subterranean world deep beneath the streets of the great capital. Wading through the sewers and other dark menacing places, your goal is to reach Undercity, the City beneath the City. Only there can you find the help you need to escape this underground horror and bring down the dark brotherhood from within.

The author of Catacombs is none other than Andrew Wright, whose Fantasy Game Book blog keeps the interactive literature torch burning very bright. Want to know more? Of course you do - and the Tin Man Games blog will beam you up fast.

All together now

Hot news from Mikael Louys, the business and creative dynamo in charge of Megara Entertainment. The Fabled Lands HD game for iPad is at #24 in the App Store RPG charts! That ranking reflects the incredible hard work that Mikael and his team put into their adaptation - indeed, their spectacular reinvention - of The War-Torn Kingdom, which is a thing of beauty that Jamie and I never dreamed of when we originally wrote the FL books.

So here's the thing. If a game can get into the Top Ten then it bobs up onto everybody's radar and it's got a good chance of staying there. And if Fabled Lands HD can get there, with just a little push, that could mean thousands of new FL fans who will help sustain the wave of RPGs, CRPGs and gamebooks that has already begun.

I know what most of you are thinking: "But I don't own an iPad." Okay, well, apart from advising you to sell your wristwatch to buy one, I'm going to say that you can certainly reach out and influence somebody who does. If not in your immediate circle of friends, family and co-workers, how about on blogs where you're leaving a comment? Or failing that, just open the window and shout.

Mikael already has his team back in harness on Cities of Gold & Glory, for which I've seen some of the truly sumptuous artwork, and there's an iPhone conversion coming in the next few months too. Getting Fabled Lands HD into the Top Ten ranking in iTunes RPGs would be a great boost for those guys, and it'd help ensure the future of Fabled Lands releases (both print and digital) as well.

So let me plead with you: if at all possible, can you try and coax at least one person to buy Fabled Lands HD this weekend? It's a steal at $7.99, and this app is no mere ebook but a full-on, full-color, atmospherically soundtracked, immersively art-intensive 2D CRPG with new extended descriptions providing dozens of hours of play. All that for less than the cost of one of the new edition FL books. No wonder the Megara staff know their boss as "Mad Mikael"!

Free e-comic

If you have an ebook reader with a decent-sized (preferably color) screen, you can grab yourself a copy of Mirabilis comic book #1 in EPUB format. It's absolutely free and you can send it to a friend. In fact, go on, we want you to - the more the merrier. And meanwhile the BookBuzzr versions of issue #1 and the first five pages of #2 are right here - just scroll down to the bottom of this page. If you look on Amazon you might find a Kindle comics version too, just do a search for "Mirabilis comics". Or read episode one online on the Mirabilis website.

The Mirabilis comics iPad app is still available too, of course, but the difference with the ebook is that you get to see each panel (gloriously rendered by Leo Hartas and Nikos Koutsis) at full-page size. A veritable feast for the eyes - and you'll enjoy the story also, that's if magic-radiating comets, invading alien cabbages, bottled witches and very bad fairies are your thing.

Folks who still prefer books grown with sunshine and water with will be heartened to hear that I have not become exclusively converted to ebooks and apps. Two whopping great hardcover volumes of Mirabilis (the first of eight covering the whole Year of Wonders) are due out in Britain and Ireland from publisher Print Media Productions in the spring. Measuring in at 9 inches by 12 inches, they'll be big enough to whack any size of insect pest. Don't try that with an iPad, obviously.

Fabled Lands HD in the App Store now!

Genius is said to be 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration, and Megara Entertainment have certainly put in the hard work necessary to create a modern gaming classic. After man-years of back-breaking and heroic labor, the Fabled Lands HD role-playing game went on sale just hours ago. All credit goes to Megara boss Mikael Louys and his chief coder, Roland Derhi, for getting this out the door - and they're already hard at work on the sequel and the iPhone version.

If you have access to an iPad, check it out as soon as you can, give it five stars, and make use of the Tell a Friend button at top right. The more people who download it today, the better the chance of getting it into the Top Ten on iTunes and staying there. And that is another thing that could help ensure the Fabled Lands gamebook series continues. So help spread the word - and have fun exploring the world of Harkuna in living color!

Friends of English (etc) magic

A whole other tradition of fantasy that's a hundred shires away from cursed swords and dank cobwebby tunnels and granite-toothed ogres is that particularly English kind of whimsical and often surreal collision between the magical and the commonplace. You can see it running through in a direct line of descent from Lord Dunsany to Harry Potter with a cadet branch extending off to The Goons and the Bonzo Dog Band.

(Er, did I say English? Dunsany was Anglo-Irish, Ms Rowling is Scottish, Spike Milligan was born in India and Viv Stanshall was heavily influenced by Dadaism, which is Swiss. So, let's call it "modern realism-grounded fantasy" and leave it at that.)

To my mind, fantasy is at its best when it encroaches onto our familiar world. Non-humans in taverns (whether from Middle-Earth or Aldebaran IV) are pure escapism, but magic that nudges in around the corners of everyday life has to reflect our real daily concerns. That's why, even in role-playing games with a high adventure setting, I like the conflicts and drama to arise out of believable human relationships and concerns. Sergio Leone showed that you can stage heroic, indeed mythic, adventure without having to save the damned world all the time. The greedy race for a box of old banknotes, the struggle to save one lost child, the always-doomed attempt to do the right thing - these are much more engaging than having to reunite the three lost pieces of the shield of Blah so that the evil lord Urg is sent back to the realm of So-what.

Hence the project that occupies my time these days is Mirabilis, a huge comic book epic that I'm weaving with Leo Hartas (pencils and inks), Nikos Koutsis (colors) and Martin McKenna (covers and concept art). A green comet appears in the sky, heralding a year when imagination and reality combine. The magic has come back into the world - and not only magic, but everything that traditionally belongs in fiction, legend and dreams. Mirabilis is my paean to fantasy, the type of fantasy that celebrates illogic and finds a tenuous, obscure circuit through the human unconscious to locate deeper truths than words and facts can ever hope to get at.

Richard Bruton, posting on the essential UK comics blog Forbidden Planet International, wrote:

"Mirabilis [has] a nice bit of mystery, dark fantasy and a very Bryan Talbot-esque art style. Hopefully we’ll be seeing this find its way into print at some point."

And indeed you will see it in print, in fact in two glorious large-format hardcover editions if you live in Britain or Ireland, as John Freeman reported in the other essential UK comics blog Down The Tubes just before Christmas.

Meanwhile you can get the Mirabilis graphic novel for iPad in App Store books, where it has risen this weekend to #7 in the "What's hot" chart. If you don't have an iPad, take a look at the little book-flippy widget thing at the bottom of this very page, and if you like the first episode and you live in the USA or Canada then you can buy the American trade paperbacks by clicking on the cover images in the sidebar or going to Barnes & Noble.

Mirabilis graphic novel app in Top 100 grossing books

I'm cross-posting this from the Mirabilis blog because Leo and I are just too darned excited to keep it under our hats. Mirabilis - Year of Wonders has been in the App Store for four days now, which is pretty fantastic as it is. But the really great news is that we just nudged into the Top 100 grossing ibooks at #99!

You can get the first instalment of the story completely free, then other chapters cost $1.99 each. So it was dizzyingly good news when we rose to #13 in UK iTunes books, but to actually be in the top-grossing charts too shows that new readers are following through with the story after they've been astounded by the fluid interface, easy in-app issue management, eye-popping zoom and page flip (courtesy of demon coder Simon Cook), magical colors (by wizard of the digital rainbow Nikos Koutsis) and stunning art (by maestro of the Wacom tablet Leo Hartas).

And don't feel left out if you don't have an iPad. You can read the first chapter on BookBuzzr or buy the trade paperback on Amazon. Next stop: the Kindle. And in the meantime, if you haven't got the Mirabilis iPad app yet, you can find it here in the USA and here in the UK. Spread the word!

A thing of beauty

This is a cross-post from the Mirabilis Year of Wonders blog, but I feel justified in squeezing a snippet about my personal projects before some more bits of big news from Fabled Lands LLP over the next week or two.

The Mirabilis Year of Wonders e-comic book is going to go live in only a few weeks now. But I just had to share this pic with you because I've been playing the ad hoc build and it really is a dream. Lush magic lantern colors, razor-sharp graphics, and an interface that's as stylish and smooth as an Irish coffee poured by George Clooney. If you're used to struggling with existing comic reader apps, you're going to be blown away by what our resident iOS wizard has conjured up.

Don't wait. Really, you should go direct to your nearest Apple retail store (look here for Apple in the UK or Apple in the US), buy yourself an iPad for Christmas, and you will then be able to get the reader app and the first chapter of Mirabilis free, with the other chapters available via our nifty in-app storefront. The Mirabilis graphic novel on iPad is our way of telling you that the Year of Wonders has arrived.

Fabled Lands in print and on iPad

New news! And today we have two items worth running up to the roof and shouting about. First, I heard from our printers that the files for Fabled Lands books 1-4 have been passed. Even now, proof copies are on their way to the Fabled Lands offices. Barring any unforeseen disasters, that means we are on course to have those books on sale by December 1st.

Second, I've just been told by Mikael Louys, indefatigable boss of Megara Entertainment, that the Fabled Lands iPad site is now live. There's plenty of incredible artwork, maps and other stuff to delight any FL fan, whether you've got an iPad or not. So why are you still here? Go feast your eyes on the goodies Mikael and his team have laid out for you.

Appy now?

Here's one of the colorized versions of Russ Nicholson's incredible Fabled Lands illustrations that app publisher Megara Entertainment has conjured up for the forthcoming glorious hi-def reimagining of War-Torn Kingdom as a full-on 2D CRPG for the iPad. Zip over to Russ's blog if you want to see more gorgeous pics from that. And very soon we should have details of a new print edition of the FL books - and not just that. Ooh, just wait. You're going to think Christmas has come early.