April A to Z - U is for what do U want from Lloyd of Gamebooks

Hello all! Today, I was just wondering if you could take up to 2 minutes to fill in a form about what you want from this blog. Supplying what my readers want is a big priority because supplying what no one wants is usually a waste of time.

Happy gamebooking!

Lone Wolf - The Board Game now for sale!

Hello all! If you are a fan of Lone Wolf (and if you haven't heard of this excellent gamebook series, you can read them all for FREE online!), you might like to know that there is now a board game out based on the Lone Wolf story.
 
You can buy it here and it looks fabulous!

Happy gamebooking!

April A to Z - T is for Tin Man Games

 Good day to you all! Today, we have Neil Rennison from Tin Man Games, the company that started making great gamebook apps back in 2008 and has been making them ever since. And they look like they will still be going for a while...

Your latest Kickstarter for The Warlock of Firetop Mountain was a huge succes and it is taking your gamebook apps to another level. What new features shall we expect to see?

Essentially at it’s base core is the gamebook. That’s what we have the license to produce and it’s the major material we have to work with. Where we’re upping our game in this instance is in two major areas which are making it more visually accessible to gamers that like modern-day RPGs and increasing replayability. The way we have done this is by introducing digital miniatures, representations in 3D of the pewter figurines you would use in a table-top RPG or wargame. The digital miniatures can be used to move around a 3D representation of Firetop Mountain that accompanies the gamebook text – very much like a board in a board game or the graph-paper maps you may construct in a tabletop D&D game. What the miniatures also allow us to do is to add replayability by playing with a different miniature each time you enter Firetop Mountain and having a slightly different experience. The motivations of one character for entering the Mountain might be very different to another.

When will Warlock be out? Where can we get it?

Hopefully around May/June on Steam. It will then come to other platforms later in the year.

Do you have any other gamebooks lined up for the Warlock experience?

Yes! Assuming Warlock does well, we’ll go straight into Deathtrap Dungeon.

Are there any future features that you can tell us about at the moment?

We’re hoping that players of Warlock will be able to take their digital miniatures from one game to another to open up easter eggs in each. All still pie in the sky at the moment, but that’s the plan!

Are you now able to talk about that thing you showed people at Fighting Fantasy Fest?

The map? Yes! Firetop Mountain will now be a 3D map that you interact with.

You have bought many great classic gamebooks to digital format, such as Fighting Fantasy, Fire*Wolf and the Forgotten Spell. Are there any authors or series that will be released this year?

We’re currently working on Grailquest.

How about gamebooks based on popular culture, such as Warhammer 40k gamebooks, Judge Dredd or the Strange Loves series? Will we see any gamebooks based on the current zeitgeist?

We’ll be looking to continue and expand our free-to-play subscription based game, Choices: And The Sun Went Out. We’re also working on a choice-based visual novel based on the Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries TV show, which is currently looking amazing!

You have also translated the foreign language gamebook Sons of Uruzime to English. Are there any other foreign language gamebooks you are looking to translate?

La Bataille de Ia Drang has been translated to English and will be coming out later in the year.

How about Orlandes? Will there be any return trips there?

Sadly not for the foreseeable. If Warlock does well for us then I wouldn’t rule out a new Orlandrian adventure in the future.

There seem to be a wave of gamebooks based on public domain/historical domain works, such as Frankenstein, 80 Days, To Be or Not To Be, Alice's Nightmare in Wonderland. Is this a seem of material that will be mined further?

Yes. We’re actually pitching an idea to someone important very soon. Watch this space.

Do you fancy writing another gamebook? A sequel to Siege of the Necromancer?

I would love to but work, life, kids, time…blah, blah, blah. ;)

How about products based on your gamebooks such as novels? Board games? RPGs? Music? Films?

We’ve investigated an RPG in the past based on Gamebook Adventures but nothing materialised.

There was a physical copy of GA1 floating around. How is that project going?

Snowbooks, a British publisher, are currently editing it!!

I know I've asked this before, but the climate was different back then. How does a gamebook writer get themselves out there today, what with a resurgence happening?

Write and self-publish. It’s actually pretty easy now although there is increased competition in that space now so choose your own genre wisely.

Besides writing, how else can people get into the gamebook world?

Illustrators and Editors are always at a premium. If you have any of those skills then you can easily leverage them if a company (or individual writer) is looking.

What do you look for in your gamebook app production team members?

Anyone we employ always needs to be able to just get on with the stuff they are good at. We are a small company with limited resources so we don’t have the time for hand-holding. Every team member is the wearer of many hats so needs to be adaptable to getting their hands dirty at times doing tasks that may not be their primary skill.

Your business is now 8 years old. Congratulations! If you had a time machine, what would you go back and tell yourself in 2008 to make your life easier?

Don’t make gamebook apps! Or do make gamebook apps but don’t expect to be one of those Angry Birds stories. That may sound bizarre as I love making our apps, but seriously the market is very niche and it’s difficult to make really good money. It’s lots and lots of hard work for very limited returns. You need to have passion and commitment and a decent LUCK roll every now and then.

April A to Z - S is for Alexis Smolensk from the Tao of DnD

Hello regulars and visitors alike! Today I am highlighting Alexis Smolensk, whose blog, the Tao of DnD is not about gamebooks (as the sharper of you worked out from the title), but the huge number of posts and resources that he has produced have been so informative and thought provoking that they have been invaluable to my gamebook writing and world building. It is for this reason that I would like to bring his blog to your attention.

I encourage you to support Alexis and his wonderful work in one or more of the following ways:

Alexis has a Patreon page where you can pledge to show appreciation support for his great work.

Alexis is currently working on a novel and he has a jumpstart proposal where you can make a one off payment in return for goodies.

Alexis has also written one novel and three excellent books on roleplaying games. You can find electronic and physical versions here.

Alexis is also offering the chance to run an online campaign to people hwo pay a certain amount on Patreon. If you would like the chance to do this, please fill in his poll to express your interest.

April A to Z - R is for reviews - an interview with Mark Lain.

Hello lovely people. Today we have Mark Lain, author of the reviews of Fighting Fantasy books on his blog along with several of his own Fighting Fantasy books. And now, we're going to have an interview with Mark.

For those of us who don’t know, tell us about yourself.

I discovered gamebooks when I was seven in the early 80s and have been a fan ever since.

I run the Malthus Dire Blog where I’ve been reviewing all the FF (and related) gamebooks for a few years now. I have written several amateur FFs which can be found online. I contribute to Titannica and Demian Katz’ massive gamebook database site. I’m also a very keen collector of gamebooks and related paraphernalia.

You have done several more reviews, including gamebooks from other sources such as Warlock Magazine. What was your favourite Fighting Fantasy adventure?

Now you’re asking... it depends on my mood and what appeals at a particular time. The obvious ones like Deathtrap Dungeon, Trial of Champions and Creature of Havoc never fail to amaze me – they were brilliant 30 years ago and they’re still brilliant now. I will always have a soft spot for WOFM because it was the first one I ever got. I like most of them. It’s a lot easier to list the ones I don’t like – Space Assassin, Chasms of Malice, Sky Lord, Black Vein Prophecy and Deathmoor are all awful and devoid of any merit at all in my opinion!

Legacy of the Vampire is about the Heydrich family inheritance. What inspired you to put that angle onto the story?

Primarily the fact that the story just cried out to be continued somehow. The Heydrich concept really appeals to me, but I didn’t want to simply bring him back from the dead again and end up retreading old territory so, instead, I went for a slightly more unusual angle. There are echoes of Hammer’s Twins of Evil in the overall idea and I make no apologies for that but I tried to make it sympathetic (and respectful) to Keith Martin’s books (there are little in-jokes for people to pick up on in it here and there) whilst putting my own stamp on it. It’s my favourite by far of the FFs I’ve written to date.

Speaking of Heydrich, was there also a plan to debug Revenge of the Vampire?

There was, yes, entitled Revenge of the Vampire: Redux. I mocked-up a cover image and started working through writing it up but I wanted too much to put my own stamp on it and started removing parts of it and substituting my own to the point where it was turning into another book entirely! I might go back to it at some point and be less drastic with it.

Sukumvit’s Grotto is a Christmas-themed gamebook where Baron Sukumvit has seemingly changed and become charitable. But of course, there’s more. Do you have any more books based on holidays?

No. That is the only one for now. It was a very spontaneous creation and only took about two weeks to put together from first having the idea to writing the final draft.

I did plan a New Year one late in 2014 but by the time it was approaching completion it was mid-January so it turned into a wedding celebration one! It’s what became Honour And Glory, in fact. It was going to be set around a New Year’s tournament originally.

You have written three books since last year – Venom of Vortan, Sukumvit’s Grotto and Legacy of the Vampire. Which one was your favourite to write?

I liked writing all three, but all for different reasons. Sukumvit’s Grotto was fun to design, I liked conjuring up all the festive puns and tropes. Venom of Vortan gave me the chance to really flex my imagination, not to mention finding lots of fiendish ways to create a true path. Legacy of the Vampire felt more like I was writing something a bit more personal.

What writing projects do you have planned next? Are there any more characters from Fighting Fantasy that you would like to base a gamebook around?

There are lots of plans in the pipeline:

I’m creating my own CreateSpace series of gamebooks called Destiny’s Role. I’ve got loads of title ideas and partially-designed concepts that I want to build into the series. There’ll be traditional fantasy, historical... anything goes, really. It’s my way of making sense of all the disparate gamebook ideas I’ve got scrawled on bits of paper. The demon idea that I created in Nightshade will be getting expanded and developed in one of them.

Right now I’m writing a stand-alone Sci-Fi gamebook called Days Without. I had the idea ages ago but now I’ve started properly developing the idea. It’s a sort of mystery based around a vanished alien race.

Once that’s written I’m then going to write up a 1940s-style detective gamebook that I’ve been designing for a Bulgarian gamebook project.

I don’t know if I’ll be writing any more FFs for the time being.

What do you plan to review next?

That’s hard to answer. I review whatever gets played at the time. The next to be reviewed will be whatever gets taken off the shelf next! The only reason there was a four month gap between October 2014’s last review and this March’s new one is that I decided to play through all of Tin Man’s Gamebook Adventures apps in order (which took a while lol.)

April A to Z - Q is for quick links to wonderful people

Hello gamebookers and visitors! Today, I have a list of links of gamebook related sites for people who I haven't managed to interview this year. Please give them a peruse!

Emily Short's Interactive Storytelling: Emily Short is a consultant for Interactive Fiction and her blog demonstrates her massive depth and breadth of knowledge on the subject along with analysis of the aspects of interactive fiction. Her posts are always very informative and helpful. She is also kind enough to review some of my Windhammer entries (here and here).

Fighting Fantasy Project:A collection of free, fan-made Fighting Fantasy gamebooks made online.

Choice of Games: A company that produces a huge collection of online gamebooks. Something for everyone!

Adventure Cow: A website that allows you to make your own interactive fiction stories and play others. They have also created the app version of Destiny Quest, called Destiny Quest Inifinite.

Crumbly Head Games: A company that produces the invaluable Gamebook Authoring Tool!

Fighting for Your Fantasy: A blog by author Justin MacCormack

Way of the Tiger Playthrough:

April A to Z - P is for Pingo

Hello lovely gamebookers and April A to Zers. Today, we have J. Pingo Lindstrom, who is a comic book writer, RPG maker and gamebok writer. So many talents...

Tell us a bit about yourself.

I'm J. Pingo Lindstrom, from Sweden. I've worked in marketing/advertisements and the sign-industry, but I also studied as a comic-creator at a small school here (one year course, one of the first comic making schools in Sweden). I've published a few fanzines and a graphic novel as well, but turned into movie making in the mid 90's, writing scripts and produced a few short films. In 2010 I produced my first feature film (Angry, with Bo Svenson), which I also wrote and directed parts of.

I've been interested in roleplaying games and solo adventures since the mid 1980's. I got The Wizard of Firetop Mountain - the Swedish edition - at Christmas, probably around 1984/1985, and that was an amazing experience. All fantasy I've done after that has always been, in some way, inspired by that particular book. In Sweden at that time we were lucky to get many Swedish editioned games of very high quality, with specially written adventures. So for me, I never really felt like I could contribute - the quality was so high!

But later on, when I started looking into table-tops, as Warhammer (both Fantasy and 40K), me and my friends made our own table-top rules, created our own figures and models - and of course, I wrote and GM'ed an amazing amount of adventures - always trying to have sound FX, clothes and even food (!) as extra properties in the game.

From there, it was only the Print-on-Demand-service that was lacking - I mean, if that had been invented in 1999, I had started publishing games already then.

You have made Drudge - a simple generic rules set for all settings. Where did the desire for this come from?

Well, back somewhere in the year 1996, or so, me and I friend (Henrik Pettersson) wanted something in the vein of Necromunda, but with roleplaying sessions more similar to Basic roleplaying - AND we wanted a really fast action system that was simple to understand and quick to play out. We didn't want a lot of details - if the figure is partly covered - it's totally covered in the game. Most cover gives the same armour rating - and so on. All to make it as quick and simple as possible - but instead also making it generic and easy for the GM to create magic in the adventures themselves!

We wanted something that could be used both on the tabletop and as a roleplaying game - and in any genre, really. We didn't want to only play epic battles, we want to be able to bring our characters into buildings, meet people, talk to people, solve a mystery - and then gun down ten guys on a roof-top. And we wanted our characters' skills to advance, so we could play campaigns.

Another thing that my friend added was "groups" - and here you can truly see the Necromunda inspiration shine through. Instead of having just one character, you have a group of characters, but one has to be a Main Character - and this is the person who does all the "talking" (mainly, not even that is set in stone).

Drudge! itself was called Grunts - and this was the name for the lesser characters in the group (all the characters started as a Grunt). But since so many other games uses the name "Grunt" in some way, I picked a name that I haven't seen any game use: Drudge!

The game was based on an even simpler system we created, based on Rock, Paper, Scissors, where each player has three cards with numbers: 1, 2 and 3. Each battle is then run with the cards - we draw the cards simultanously. 1 beats 2, 2 beats 3 and 3 beats 1. Easy, and very quick. No skills, no other stuff - just super-quick action. This was for us to play fun, fast table top games with modded figures. We expended on this until there's nothing left of the original game. Maybe I'll release those early rules as a free table top later.

There are some Drudge adventures available. Do you have any more planned?

Yes, The Monster from the Other Side is a small, first, adventure. The first "official" adventure. With the Drudge! rules is also a license for anyone to build their own adventures and even sell them with the Drudge! logo and name - without giving us any money. I wanted to give other creators the opportunity to make stuff, without having to be bothered with license fees and stuff like that. Bring out your best adventures - create and earn money!

I have started to outline a western adventure, and I have a few others planned as well - post-apoclaypse of course, but I also want to do some sci-fi-spaceship stuff and fantasy dungeon crawler adventures as well. Currently, the Drudge! adventures are a bit on hold, since I'm working so hard on the Random Solo Adventures, but I hope to release at least two more adventures in 2016. Not sure if I can keep that schedule - but I'll try.

You created the Random Solo Adventures. They allow you to have a different adventure every time based on die rolling. How did you come up with the idea?

I've wanted to (and tried to) make my own solo adventures ever since that christmas in 1984. But never really got anywhere. Again, I thought that the only way to do it was to do a 400 paragraph fantasy book that is BETTER than Wizard of Firetop Mountain. It wasn't until a few years ago I re-visited the game book market and understood that everyone else also tried to do this - and failed. It's just not possible to create a better game book than that. :-)

But that said, I also understood that a game book doesn't have to be 400 paragraphs. With games like Quill (amazing stuff - get it!) you see that the game book is taken to completely different territory - something I tried with my utterly weird free Random Solo Adventure: Pinball.

The first book in the series, Fantasy Dungeon, was heavily inspired by the Dungeon Robber random map (http://blogofholding.com/dungeonrobber/index.php) - an amazing game map that is truly cool. When I saw that, I thought it should be possible to translate that into a game book - so I tried, and after some different versions, I ended up with Fantasy Dungeon.

It was more difficult than I first thought to make a random adventure - especially since you need to be pretty generic. But I think it works pretty well.

In your Fantasy solo adventure, you even create a randomly generated quest. Was it difficult to come up with a scenario that had so many objectives?

Yes, and no. This is actually the part where I got most critique - the quest is random, but I don't really follow it through the whole way, using some techniques towards the end that could have been done better. I changed this entirely in the next book, Jungle Quest, which is more linear, but feels more solid because of it.

However, the Fantasy Dungeon still is pretty much fun just because of the 18 different quests - and it was very difficult to find out a way to find sollutions to the quests without creating a 1,000 paged book!

The main reason why I used the techniques I did in Fantasy Dungeon, was that I mainly inteded this book to be published as a softcover pocket, and not ebook. I didn't plan an ebook version at first at all - and because of this, I needed to try to stay within 100-140 pages, otherwise it would be so much more expensive. It wasn't until later I discovered the DriveThru-sites and started the PDF-versions (which sell very well, by the way).

Your next Random Solo Adventure is based on Bram Stoker's Dracula. What made you decide to make an adventure based on Public Domain stories?

Dracula is an amazing story in itself and the original novel is written in an interesting way, using mainly letters, diary pages and newspaper articles.

The Coppola movie (Dracula, 1992), which had the title on the poster as "Bram Stoker's Dracula" by the way, is one of my all time favourite films. It's heavily flawed, but there's something with it that keeps drawing me back. It's entertainment - and I love entertainment!

So I planned to do Dracula - but not until much later. Currently I am finishing Post Apocalypse. But I met Greenhickup (the artist for the Dracula project) on DeviantArt, and we talked about creating the project together, and try to get funds by launching a Kickstarter campaign. He's in Macedonia and is also a true fan of the film, as well as the original book, and have made some interesting similar gothic stuff before - so he was sold on the project right away. If he hadn't come in so strongly on this, I don't think I would have launched the project so soon - but he made me enthusiastic of it as well, so we're a great team. It's really fun to create these projects when you have this creativity momentum.

About "public domain", though - I've worked with similar works before. I created Allen Quartermain, a female decendant to Allan Quartermain, and wrote a script together with Josh Hoffman (filmmaker from USA), and I have also started to look into other similar stories for future games and projects. I also control the rights to the UK/Spanish sci-fi comic AXA, so I understand the value of a brand and already made products.

What future adventures do you have planned?

Pirates!

That will be a fun book to write - I am huge fan of BLACK SAILS.

But it would be fun to write something in the vein of THE THICK OF IT, with a swearing Malcolm Tucker-kind of villain, but I don't have the language skills for it.

But I guess a fantasy-themed Thieves story, a sci-fi Planet War story and maybe even a Frankenstein and a Werewolf book wouldn't be out of the question. I have also toyed with the idea on making a "second series" of Random Solo Adventures with only World War II themed storylines - but it means a lot of research, so I guess that's in the future.

Getting ideas for stuff to write is NOT the problem. It's the opposite actually, I get distracted from my writing by ideas that keep popping up. I have lists and lists of titles, and sometimes I even go and make posters or front-page mockups just to see how it would look. This goes for game books, movies and adventures.

You also make illustrations. What kind of illustrations do you like doing?

I do some simple black/white line-art mainly, to fill up backgrounds or if I need something special, fast. I have a great Samsung pad with a pen that I'm using to draw on, and then I bring the pics into Photoshop to complete them there.

I've also made some colorized cute little monsters, but I'm saving those for some strange childrens book for the future.

What do you have planned next for the future?

Mainly the Random Solo Adventures and Drudge! Adventures - but I am constantly playing around with card-game ideas (Oh yea, I did release a card game a few years ago). I like simple and fast rules, but I also like stuff that feels epic and that can create large areas - like big dungeons, citites and stuff. I also like games where you can play solo. I just don't have time anymore to bring a lot of friends together - it's too much logistics. :-)

But I do have three feature films in post, so as soon as those are completed, I guess I have to go out and sell those - which means I loose some time for the games. But we'll see... Nothing is set in stone.