Immersive books on your phone

In The Story is a gamebook app for readers and authors. I usually prefer to read in print myself. I can navigate the text better than on a Kindle, but it does mean that every room in my house is lined with bookshelves and there are overspill boxes in the loft. Where gamebooks are concerned, though, there's a lot to be said for an app that keeps track of keywords and stats and that means you don't have to keep flipping back and forth through the pages. That's why Down Among the Dead Men is available in digital form on the Storm Weavers store and you can read my interactive version of Frankenstein in multiple languages.

If you're an author, it looks like you can assemble your gamebook in a browser and then publish on the ITS platform. And the technology gives you access to all sorts of gameplay features such as tracking the passage of time, which is very fiddly in print gamebooks, as players of Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective will know. A new medium opens up new opportunities, so although it will be nice to see some classic gamebooks like Way of the Tiger on the In The Story platform, it's the all-new content I'm looking forward to.

The early bird...

Alkonost have some very fine gamebook editions for French readers, as these gorgeous covers and interior maps show. And you can now pre-order books that will be officially released in October, and I'm told that pre-orders made now should be delivered as early as next month so you'll get them a full four months early. Do I need to say more?

Blow the man down

Thirty-five years after it was first published, my pirates-and-sorcery gamebook Down Among The Dead Men is rising from the deeps as an app. More on that tomorrow.

The determination of incident

When you're playing a gamebook, how much freedom do you want in creating the main character? As I'm a roleplayer I like to define a character for myself, and that attitude is reflected in most of my own gamebooks. Yet even back in the early days of the medium, series like Falcon, Way of the Tiger and Lone Wolf presented the player with a pre-defined character who came with a history, a name, and usually an implied set of beliefs.

Nowadays, perhaps because of the influence of CRPGs, many gamebooks expect you to play the character the author gives you. To some extent that's what Paweł Dziemski and I have done in Whispers Beyond The Stars, our Cthulhu Mythos gamebook currently available for pre-ordering on Gamefound. The amnesia gambit (trust me, it makes sense in the story) means that you have plenty of latitude to decide what your Alex Dragan is like, a bit like Doug Quaid in Total Recall. There's history there, and other people react to you based on that, but you still have the final say about what motivates your character in the here and now.

What's your preference? A blank slate? A sketchy template? Or a fully author-defined persona?

Whispers Beyond The Stars (a new Cthulhu Mythos gamebook)

In Cthulhu 2050: Whispers Beyond The Stars you are Alex Dragan, a recently freed convict who has chosen to have "the Wipe", neurosurgical adjustment that has left you with no memory of your crime. The idea is that it will make it easier for you to rehabilitate, but your partial amnesia starts to complicate things when you realize that the society into which you've been released is politically divided, fraught with global tensions, and plagued by power outages and cyberhacks that seem to be tied to mysterious numbers stations.

Following several violent deaths, suspicion falls on you as an ex-con and you are forced to flee. On the run, you will encounter bizarre conspiracies and phenomena that defy sanity. Without your own memories to rely on you must decide who you can trust and who is a deadly foe pretending to be a friend. And as you struggle to stay alive, you start to uncover the terrible truth that connects the threat of global war to the scheming of entities older than humanity itself.

The gamebook, which will be released in both physical book and digital format, blends deep storytelling with easy-to-grasp gameplay, dropping you into a world where cosmic horror meets futuristic mystery. Your character can specialize in different approaches – fight your way through with COMBAT, sneak past dangers using STEALTH, hack systems with TECH, overcome physical challenges with ATHLETICS, talk your way out with SOCIAL skills, or uncover hidden truths through INVESTIGATION. You get to choose Dragan's training (military, police, space travel, or an undefined wildcard background) which will both shape your history and unlock unique options as you play.

The two key stats are Health and Sanity. Health drops when you're physically hurt. Sanity diminishes when you witness things the human mind wasn't meant to comprehend. If either stat reaches zero your story ends -- or maybe it doesn't, thanks to the innovative "Wake From This Nightmare" journal system. (See below.)

As you explore this broken future, the game remembers your discoveries, relationships, and key decisions through keywords that become part of your ongoing story. So your choices really do matter, opening or closing paths as you progress and having enduring consequences. In the journal you can keep track of important events and locations, which helps you to navigate the tangled conspiracy unfolding around you. (In the digital version the app does it all for you automatically.)

The "Wake From This Nightmare" save system connects gameplay mechanics with the story's themes of fractured reality. When your character, Alex Dragan, dies or breaks mentally, you don't just restart. You "wake up" at a previous journal entry as if it was all just a nightmare vision. You first death sends you back one entry, your second death sends you back two, and so on. What makes this unique is how Alex retains hazy memories of what's to come, giving you a chance to make different choices and avoid the fate you've glimpsed.

This mechanic is designed to fit the Lovecraftian vibe, where objective reality becomes increasingly unstable and elusive. The line between dreams and waking blurs until both you and Alex will start wondering what's real and what's just a glimpse of possible futures. Is Alex truly seeing the future -- or is his or her mind cracking under the weight of cosmic revelations?

Cthulhu 2050 is a collaboration between me and award-winning game designer Paweł Dziemski. We think what makes it truly special is how the gameplay elements create real narrative consequences. Your choices don't just determine which page to read next – you will forge uneasy alliances, uncover hidden truths, and ultimately decide humanity's fate against forces from beyond the dawn of history. It's currently crowdfunding, with the app version due for release the moment the campaign ends on January 6th, so if you want that and the premium hardcover edition and lots of other gruesome goodies, slither over there now and join our unspeakable cult.

The shape of things to come

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,

The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant.

Gamebooks: a lightning tour

I've just heard about a great resource for gamebook fans: thirty-one themes in the medium, from horror to SF to modern to non-fantasy. Duncan Thomson's (no relation to Jamie as far as I know) in-depth post covers hundreds of different gamebook series both classic and modern. Check it out on Rand Roll here.

And if you want to write your own gamebook, Stuart Lloyd has compiled an invaluable reading list to get you started. And trawling through some old posts here (such as this one) might also prove inspiring. I also find it useful to listen to Hieronymus J Doom's perceptive analyses of gamebooks on the Haunted Phonograph and Ed Jolley's Adventure Gameblog.

Talking of gamebooks, have you been keeping up with Prime Games' development reports on the CRPG version of Blood Sword? The latest concerns my favourite character class to write, the Trickster:

"The Warrior holds the line. The Enchanter bends the arcane. The Sage unveils hidden truths. The Trickster thrives where no one else dares -- in shadows, in whispers, in the thin places between honour and survival. Assassin, Knave, Hunter, or something in between, the Trickster proves that guile can be sharper than steel."

Read more about the Blood Sword CRPG and add it to your Steam wishlist here.

New Tokyo 2130

Any new gamebook by David Velasco and Riq Sol is an event worthy of notice. David and Riq are the creative talent behind Expeditionary Company, a truly groundbreaking work, so when they say they're planning an even more ambitious project there's reason to get excited. New Tokyo 2130 has vibes of Blade Runner and (maybe) a dash of Heart of Ice, but no doubt with many completely original elements too. You can upgrade your frail human body with up to sixty cybernetic enhancements, for instance. Definitely one to watch.

Ill doings in God's country

Dragon Warriors' 40th anniversary won't pass unnoticed as long as Red Ruin Publishing have anything to say about it. They've just released the seventeenth book in their series of DW adventures, and it's one of the best. The Curse on God's Acre is a 500+ section gamebook by David Donachie and Paul Partington:

Deep in the fertile countryside of Chaubrette, you find yourself in the isolated valley known as God's Acre. Here the sturdy locals grow wine and keep sheep — but all is not as it seems. A pernicious evil haunts the lanes and narrow fields.

Revealed at first in scraps of children's songs, in the blank stares of straw dolls, in the animals masks lurking in the shadows, in the tangled entrails of a murdered woman. Mysterious evil has the valley in its grasp and is squeezing ever tighter.

Special rules for dread and exhaustion add to the sense (for me, anyway) of a blending of Clark Ashton Smith's eerie tales of Averoigne with the straightforward secular horrors of The Wicker Man. But to make any such comparison is to sell this atmospheric and original adventure short. The Curse on God's Acre is a memorable solo scenario that deserves a place in every Dragon Warriors player's collection. You can pick it up for as little as $1 if you're hard up, and the artwork alone is worth more than that, so grab your copy now.

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..?

Halloween treat, no trick

Forty years ago I wrote my first gamebook. I was a roleplayer and board gamer. I’d played the Fantasy Trip solo adventures, and even wrote a short solo dungeon for my friend Steve Foster (designer of Mortal Combat) when he had to spend a week in hospital, but I’d hardly noticed the growing kids’ gamebook craze until Ian Livingstone asked me to write a serialized solo adventure for White Dwarf. That was The Castle of Lost Souls.

It wasn’t long before almost everyone I knew was signing up to write a gamebook series. Joe Dever and Gary Chalk left Games Workshop to do Lone Wolf. Jamie Thomson too, teaming up with Mark Smith (who was another stalwart of our Tekumel campaign) to create Way of the Tiger and Falcon. You can see why Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson (UK) might have felt a bit miffed. They’d started a trend and now half their workforce was deserting the ship to jump on the bandwagon – if that isn’t mixing metaphors.

I used to freelance for White Dwarf a lot in those days, but once Jamie quit the editorial chair I didn’t have as much reason to show up at the office. Then Steve Jackson asked me to come in to talk about a series of gamebooks that he wanted to publish. He and Ian were committed to doing more Fighting Fantasy for Puffin Books, so these would be Games Workshop’s own series.

Steve was always coming up with fascinating game mechanics. He told me about a little tactical combat system he’d thought of when stuck in a motel in the middle of America. You had a tactical diagram that showed which actions were permitted in a combat round. So from EVADE you could move to DEFEND, REST or NORMAL ATTACK. From DEFEND you could only move to EVADE or NORMAL ATTACK, and so on.

When the player’s action was compared with the opponent’s, that gave the number of hit points each combatant lost. ‘Do you think you could use this for a gamebook?’ Steve wondered.

I went away and did a little work on it. I can’t remember how I handled the NPC adversaries, but this was a 1980s gamebook so there wasn’t going to be any AI. Probably the NPCs just acted randomly each round, and that was cross-referenced with the player’s action to give the outcome for that round. That would eat up a lot of paragraphs if every encounter had its own set of action entries, so I imagine I had a few dozen entries for each of several types of monster. They could be customized by SPECIAL ATTACKS, which would vary depending on the monster.

‘Looks good,’ reckoned Steve, ‘but I’d like to see a sample. Fifty or sixty sections, say.’

I went home, sat down at my Olympia Traveller typewriter, and began: ‘Dusk in Wistren Wood…’ and launched into a solo adventure in a vampire’s mansion. When I showed it to Steve he liked it and proposed a contract for Vampire Crypt, as it was then called. When the contract came it had a clause preventing me from writing gamebooks for any other publishers. I’m glad I never signed it, as if I had then my writing career would have been over before it began. (You may have noticed that Games Workshop never did get around to publishing their own gamebook series.)

Still, I was left with the beginning of a gamebook. When I signed with Grafton Books a few months later to do the Golden Dragon series, those fifty sample sections let me get a head start on the tight deadlines. Of course I couldn’t use Steve Jackson’s clever rule system, but Golden Dragon needed something a lot simpler anyhow. And thus Crypt of the Vampire was born – or spawned, or sired, or whatever the appropriate term is for vamps.

(Yes, these are the original maps and notes. I'm that much of a hoarder.)

And here we are at the 40th anniversary. To mark it I dug out a reboot of the book that I wrote for Amazon a couple of years ago. They wanted apps for Alexa (for some reason they call them skills) so I turned Crypt of the Vampire into The Vampire’s Lair, a consciously old-school adventure in audio form. Rather than retain the dungeon fantasy flavour of the original, though, I leaned into the influences of those Universal and Hammer monster movies I loved as a kid, when horror was delicious shuddersome fun and before it became synonymous with serial killers, torture porn and (yawn) demonic possession.

The text I wrote for that is now on sale for Halloween in a slim paperback with Leo Hartas’s original illustrations reworked in full colour. (My generous Patreon backers get to read it for free -- just sayin'.) It was Leo’s first book too. I’d seen his portfolio when he came into the White Dwarf offices one day, and when my editor at Grafton, Angela Sheehan, asked me if there were any artists I wanted for the series Leo's name sprang to mind. And because of that I began a close and dear friendship, a friendship which also now forty years old. If it were a marriage that means Leo and I would be celebrating our ruby anniversary – a very suitable hue given the blood-sucking tastes of the sinister count.

Darkness visible -- at last

It turned into a real labour of Hercules -- sorry, Herakles -- but it was worth it because now I can say: the Vulcanverse series is complete! The fifth and final book, Workshop of the Gods, is finally available in either colour hardcover edition or in paperback. As the blurb puts it:

Vulcan City is a place of striking contrasts. A metropolis where marble palaces and gilded rooftops soar against the sky, whose walls and towers seem to approaching travellers like the flanks of mountains, where gold and jewels overflow the coffers of wily merchants, and where nobles in silk finery indulge in epicurean pleasures to rival the banquets of Olympus.

But it is also a place of teeming streets and plazas where cutthroats and spies hide themselves amid the crowds, where narrow alleyways can lead to stinking, maze-like warrens where the unwary visitor is soon as lost as in the deepest wood. In candlelit taverns you may overhear whispered secrets that can make a fortune or ruin a reputation. And here in the magnificent hub at the centre of the Vulcanverse, life is often as cheap as a trinket sold on a marketplace stall.

Meet up again with old friends and bitter enemies. Uncover long-buried secrets, hunt down thieves and murderers, wrestle with demons, cross swords with assassins, join criminal gangs – even come face to face with the spectre of your own death.

Visit the puppet shows where you’ll find hints about the fate of a universe. Seek counsel from the oracle who is privy to the insight of the gods – if you can afford it. Venture into the prison that holds the cleverest man alive, knowing that you must either befriend him or kill him. Lay claim if you can to a mansion brimming with treasures and traps. Rise in society, making alliances among the ruling factions. And attend the glittering party at Vulcan's palace, whose location is hidden from the eyes of ordinary mortals, where you will set out on a perilous journey through space and time to reach the crucial, cataclysmic battle between light and darkness towards which all your choices have been leading.

This is the city where all possibilities meet, where destinies are made, where the fate of the Vulcanverse will finally be decided.

In the Vulcanverse series, as in Fabled Lands, you can begin in any region and travel freely back and forth between the books to pursue your quests. But there are significant differences from the earlier series. In Fabled Lands there's no central storyline, whereas in Vulcanverse most of the hundreds of quests feed into a plot that builds across all five books to an epic finale that occupies the second half of Workshop of the Gods. Your choices in the books have lasting consequences, altering the fate of nations and even the very landscape. You'll develop relationships with recurring characters, both friends and foes. And you will bear the scars as well as carry the glory of your exploits through all 6115 sections (more than fifteen Fighting Fantasy length gamebooks!) and three quarters of a million words. Did I say epic? It's longer than The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit combined.

And what is your ultimate goal through the series? As you'll soon discover, darkness casts a lengthening shadow over the Vulcanverse, threatening all who dwell in the five realms. Queen Nyx, with her dread sons Death and Sleep at her side, has unleashed a devastating war that will sweep away both gods and titans and leave her the unchallenged monarch of all creation. You must hone your skills, win over allies, and gather the weapons and clues that will make you into the Hero of the Age, the only mortal capable of opposing the Night Queen.

Although technically the fifth book, this is actually a good one to start your adventures in. That way you'll have a base in the city which is the hub for all the other regions. You can visit the Oracle in the temple district to get hints, and your family will introduce you to mentor characters who can help you figure out some of the major quests that you'll need to complete.

Jamie and I are keen to hear what people think of this series. So if open-world solo roleplaying is your thing, do pick up a volume or five, embark on some adventures, and tell us how you get on.

You can find a copy of the Adventure Sheet for the book here, and the books themselves (both hardcover and paperback editions) here.

You want fries with that?

In a very short time (I say that with fingers crossed) I'll be ready to put my Jewelspider RPG on DriveThruRPG. Urged by regular correspondent Stanley Barnes, and with the help of Simon Barns of Red Ruin Publishing, I thought I'd better learn the DriveThru ropes by uploading some books I did earlier.

So, if you're looking for digital gamebooks, you can now get the Critical IF series from DriveThruRPG:

• Heart of Ice
• Down Among the Dead Men
• Necklace of Skulls
• Once Upon a Time in Arabia

As well as the grand finale of the Blood Sword series:

• The Walls of Spyte

And a former Fighting Fantasy title that has been reworked as a standalone adventure in the Fabled Lands series:

• The Keep of the Lich Lord

And the first Fabled Lands book:

• The War-Torn Kingdom

You get a watermarked PDF with all the sections hyperlinked and the original illustrations by Russ Nicholson and Leo Hartas. In the case of Once Upon a Time in Arabia that makes this quite a collector's item, incidentally, as the print version currently lacks Russ's pictures.

A world where you can make a difference

The Vulcanverse gamebooks don't get nearly enough reviews. I would say that, wouldn't I? But Jamie and I genuinely feel they're some of our best work. We're aware that the gamebook resurgence, such as it is, is mainly driven by adults buying the books they enjoyed as kids. Naturally that makes it hard for a new series to break through, but there are standout successes: Steam Highwayman, Legendary Kingdoms, Expeditionary Company, and others. 

Our hope is that with the completion of the saga (Workshop of the Gods is due to be published in a few months) readers will get to appreciate the full story arc that's been building across the series. The entire adventure is over 6000 sections long, that's more than 15 old-style Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, and there are decisions you make right from the start that have repercussions in the apocalyptic showdown at the end.

Yes, I know, I could do with a better microphone. Still, if that all whets your appetite, you can get started by downloading Adventure Sheet PDFs for the Vulcanverse series here:

• Workshop of the Gods (Vulcan City)
• The Houses of the Dead (Hades)
• The Hammer of the Sun (Notus)
• The Wild Woods (Arcadia)
• The Pillars of the Sky (Boreas)

Gamebook hallucinations

There's a lot of misunderstanding about generative AI. "These large language models just babble nonsense," people say. Well, why not? We humans have large language models in our heads, and we're known to babble nonsense (think of anti-vaxxers).

An LLM's usefulness depends on what's behind it. Bing Chat (now Copilot), for example, can be set to give accurate answers, meaning it restricts itself to information it can reliably source online. And copilot AIs are the really useful tools. Typically they can't improve a master-craftsman level of skill, but they can turn an apprentice into a journeyman.

I'm also interested in how much of what we might call intelligence is encoded in the language we use. Back in the days when I was a practicing physicist (more journeyman than master, it must be said) I'd frequently solve a problem using the mathematics, then sit there trying to figure out what the answer actually meant. The language (maths in this case) got there first. Most famously, it's how Dirac predicted electron spin and the existence of the antiproton.

I'm drifting off track here. Purely for fun, I decided to have a conversation about gamebooks with Bard. What could it tell me about the early days of open-world gamebooks? "Here's one," said Bard:

Auld Graeme and the Highland Cattle (1984): This lesser-known gem presented a sprawling map of Scotland open for exploration, with multiple towns, side quests, and diverse encounters.

Auld Graeme and the Highland Cattle? The first open-world gamebook? That sounds intriguing -- if highly unlikely. Who wrote it, I asked? "Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone," Bard replied. But when pressed to back up its claims with sources it admitted:

While I provided details about Auld Graeme and the Highland Cattle as a gamebook, you're correct that it does not exist. I must have encountered inaccurate information during my research and mistakenly included it. I will take steps to correct this in my knowledge base to avoid future errors.

It won't, incidentally; it won't remember the conversation. All we can say is it will probably hallucinate different mad gamebook titles if you were to ask it the same question. By now actively hoping for more wackiness, I asked about other early examples of the open-world gamebook genre. Bard didn't disappoint:

The Dawn of the Sandbox

• Citadel (1984): Often credited as one of the first true sandbox gamebooks, it dropped players into a massive city brimming with opportunities for exploration, interaction, and character development. 
• Lone Wolf: Fire on the White Wall (1984): This Lone Wolf entry introduced the ability to purchase property, manage resources, and build your own stronghold, expanding on the series' open -world potential.

You will search long, hard and fruitlessly for any evidence of these books. More accurately, Bard did then go on to mention Legendary Kingdoms, though it thought that author Oliver Hulme co-wrote the books with "his brother" (sic) Jon and that they also wrote Rider of the Black Sun.

Heart of Ice isn't sandbox, but I asked about it anyway. Bard confidently explained the book's main features:

Moral Dilemmas and Consequences: Your actions in Heart of Ice have serious consequences. Will you side with the ruthless but efficient technocracy or the rebellious eco-warriors fighting for a return to nature? Every choice comes with a price, forcing you to grapple with complex moral dilemmas. 

Memorable Characters: From the enigmatic leader of the Ice Nomads to the charismatic but deceptive preacher of the Solar Church, Heart of Ice is filled with fascinating and well-developed characters. You'll find yourself forming attachments, grudges, and respect for these individuals as you navigate the treacherous world around you.

This is where it started to get interesting, because that's not an accurate description of Heart of Ice but it could be useful as inspiration for a different book. I wondered what Bard might invent concerning the Vulcanverse series. It rose to this one with enthusiasm:

Ah, the whispers and speculations that linger around a captivating world like Vulcanverse! Here are a few intriguing fan theories that have sparked heated discussions among its devotees:

• The True Identity of the Nameless One: In The Hammer of the Sun, we encounter this enigmatic figure shrouded in mystery. Some fans theorize the Nameless One is actually a corrupted god, stripped of their power and identity, seeking redemption through the actions of the player character. Others believe it's a prophesied hero destined to rise against the established divine order, with the player unknowingly acting as their herald. 
• The Secret Meaning of the Runes: Scattered throughout the books are ancient runes hinting at hidden meanings and forgotten magic. Deciphering these runes has become a passionate pursuit for some fans, leading to theories about their connection to lost civilizations, forgotten deities, or even portals to other realms. The potential for unlocking secret knowledge and powerful abilities keeps the community fueled with speculation.

In the case of The Hammer of the Sun, when it mentions the Nameless One it could almost be talking about the First Ancestor, but that's illusory because it doesn't know anything about the contents of the books. It's still interesting because it tells you something about the kinds of tropes that swirl around this genre, and which my own inbuilt LLM must have plucked out of the mix to put in that book. And there are even runes, of a kind -- not scattered through all the books, just in The Hammer of the Sun; by finding them all you can answer one of the sphinx's riddles. (Er, I mean: the riddle of one of the sphinxes.)

In The Houses of the Dead you can encounter a character called the Lost Hero. I asked Bard about them.

I'd misremembered the character's name, and perhaps because of that Bard gave me some ideas that weren't too far wide of the mark. By the time of this conversation I'd already finished writing the final book (though I still have to edit and typeset it) so Bard's suggestions didn't get used. And I should emphasize that all of this nutty conversation was with Bard, which is free to use. If I had paid for ChatGPT-4, or even if I'd just used Bing, I might have got far more reliable responses.

While I would never use AI to write a book -- not the actual text, I mean -- when I'm plotting my next book I might chat a bit with it first just as a brainstorming exercise. As a way of getting started it beats staring at a blank page.

When life gives you limes...

Few people have done more to keep the gamebook flame burning than Stuart Lloyd, whose blog Lloyd of Gamebooks continues to feature top-notch news, ideas and design tips. And once a year the cherry on the cake is the Lindenbaum Prize, a competition that Stuart co-runs with Peter Agapov of Augmented Reality Adventure Games to find the new gamebooks pushing the medium forward into fresh territory.

Everything you need to know about this year's Lindenbaum Prize is right here. Entries open on December 6 and run through to February 20. Better get planning.

A very witching time

My first published book was Crypt of the Vampire. That was before the Soviet Union fell. A couple of years ago I reworked it as an Alexa app (Amazon call them skills, but apps is what they are) but it never saw the light of day because the coder lost interest. Eventually -- by which I mean after I've finished Vulcanverse book 5, Jewelspider, Tetsubo, Abraxas and Λ -- I'll release that revised version as a book.

But you don't have to wait that long for some sinister vampiric thrills, because Red Ruin Publishing have unleashed another of their top-notch free Dragon Warriors solo adventures, Lair of the Vampire, set in Hudristania, where:

"...tiny villages squat miserably in the isolated mountain passes, like birds’ nests huddled into a crag for shelter. Frightened peasants quake under the rule of a hundred local despots. Terror soars aloft on membraneous wings by night and sifts the carrion in lonely churchyards—for this is the traditional home of vampires, ghouls and werewolves. Black-clad priests trek from valley to valley, but the peasants are always torn between faith and fear. Spend a few days in any of the mountain villages and you will see a funeral procession wending a path down through the narrow streets—old men whose lined faces show the scars of many losses, grim youths with jaws set in sullen defiance, veiled women sending up a shrieking lament, and wailing children who have yet to learn the injustice into which they have been born. The mourners are led by a priest with a silver crucifix on his breast. Watch and wait. After the procession has gone past, once the wailing and the clanging of the priest's bell have faded into the distance, you may see another figure pass by. He follows the mourners at a respectful distance, his eyes showing only a weary determination. On his back he has a heavy knapsack. After the coffin has been lowered into the ground, the priest will linger to pay this man a few silvers before hurrying back with the other villagers to bolt his door. The stranger opens his knapsack and prepares the items he will need. He is a draktoter, a profession that combines gravedigging with another unpleasant duty. He takes the mallet and stake from his sack and turns towards the open grave. It is his job to see that the ranks of the nosferatu will not be joined by this unfortunate soul."

(Incidentally, have I recommended Marcus Sedgwick's My Swordhand is Singing to you? Terrible title for a really down and dirty old-style vampire story that captures that same grim flavour.)

Over on Patreon today there are three adventure seeds for Halloween, as well as plenty of other material relating to Jewelspider and the lands of Legend generally. Also downloadable free from Red Ruin, and packed with the usual high standard of rules, scenarios, discussion and source material, comes Casket of Fays issue 11. Aunty Crookback alone will give you reason to close the curtains as dusk gathers, and you'll hesitate to answer the door to what sounds like trick-or-treaters...

Just a scratch

While talking to Paweł Dziemski at Other Worlds (publishers of the beautiful Polish edition of Heart of Ice) we realized -- well, Paweł did -- that the strict Endurance rules of the original Blood Sword books are not in step with the thinking of modern gamebooks. Back then, your hit points were whittled away and if you got to zero, too bad: bury that character and go back to the start.

It's never fun dying in a gamebook, but at least if it happens because of a bad decision then you can accept that you should have thought more about it or watched out for the clues and warnings. When you just conk out from hit point attrition, that's a death of a thousand paper cuts. These days it's likely to have you throwing the book across the room.

Of course, you could include a sage in the party and rely on their healing, but the rules shouldn't make it impossible for you to play without a sage. Paweł suggested restoring Endurance to full if characters survive a fight, but I didn't want to go quite that far as it would make the sage's healing power pretty useless.

So I've added these optional rules to the Blood Sword books. Use any that take your fancy:

• After winning a fight, every surviving character in the party can recover half their lost Endurance points rounded up. For example, if you normally have 30 Endurance and you end a fight with 9 Endurance, you can restore your score to 20. This only applies if you are victorious, not if you flee from the combat. Endurance is not recovered until the battle is over and all opponents have been vanquished. A character who was reduced to 0 Endurance during the fight does not recover; they are dead and gone.
• Instead of unlimited movement on the tactical maps, you move a number of squares equal to ½ your Awareness.
• If killed in a combat that the rest of the party win, a character returns to life with 1-6 Endurance.
• If the whole party is killed, use the flee option for that section (if there is one) and return to life with 1d6 Endurance each. (So the party only dies if there is no flee option.)

The Blood Sword series is on Amazon (UK and US and worldwide).

Peaks that stretch to the floor of heaven

If you've yet to start exploring the Vulcanverse, a good place to get prepped is over at the Vulcan Forged site where a fascinating new series of posts is providing an in-depth look at the lore of each region of this immersive world. This month it's the turn of Boreas, the icy mountain realm. (Part 1 here and part 2 here.)

A quick recap: Vulcanverse is an open world gamebook series. You can start in any book and travel back and forth between them. So far, so Fabled Lands. The differences with Vulcanverse are that you can explore the world with NPC companions, you get free resurrections (most of the time), and there are many more opportunities than in other gamebooks to permanently change the world by your actions.

Also in contrast to Fabled Lands, the whole Vulcanverse story builds to an epic finale in the fifth book, Workshop of the Gods, which will be released in a few months' time. I've been labouring away at the manuscript for almost a year (you'll never hear me criticize George RR Martin's work rate; I know just what it's like) and I now have over 20,000 words of notes covering the endgame sequence alone. The finished book will be around 1200 sections long, making the whole Vulcanverse series nearly 5000 sections and more than 600,000 words. After this one I might need a lie down.

Save your obols for Charon

Our cut-rate special offer on The Hammer of the Sun was such a hit with readers that we've decided to extend it to all the Vulcanverse books in paperback. 

Is this just a ploy to get you to try the series? You bet it is. Jamie and I think we've done some of our best work here and it's a shame that it might get overlooked just because it's an all-new series without a glow of nostalgia to attract gamebook fans' attention.

As Vulcanverse is an open-world series you can start in any book. The Houses of the Dead and The Wild Woods provide a bit more of a directed CRPG-style experience, with simple quests you can finish in half an hour or less, while The Pillars of the Sky and The Hammer of the Sun give a much wider canvass where there are epic payoffs that significantly change the world, but to earn the major rewards you'll need to actively seek out those quests and be persistent.

The fifth book, Workshop of the Gods, is where all these quests come together. (The image here, while generated by AI, just happens to illustrate one of the key scenes you might reach if you are able to cross the Ocean of Night.) I'm writing that final book now and it should be out early next year. While you're waiting, why not see how many of these bad boys you can cram in a Christmas socking?

You can also buy the paperbacks from Amazon in Spain, Germany, Italy, France, and Japan.

Here is an online Adventure Sheet for all the books.