Gamebook store

Sunday 29 July 2012

Gardens of riotous foliage in the white sea-cast sunlight

You saw it here first. The new paperback edition of Fabled Lands 5: The Court of Hidden Faces has gone to proof stage this weekend. All being well, you can expect it on sale within a few weeks.

Now I really need to get on with other pressing work (the follow-up to Frankenstein for one, the six gamebooks for our spring venture for another) but I'm going to keep tinkering with the files for Book 6: Lords of the Rising Sun whenever I have a spare moment, and that should certainly be ready in good time for Christmas.

In the meantime, here's a taster of Book 5. Most of the book was written by Jamie, but a small chunk of it was ghosted by Tim Harford and this was my own contribution:
From a distance the towers of Aku seem to hover in the air like a city in a mirage. Gardens of riotous foliage cascade like green waterfalls from the elegant pinnacles and domes. Windows of brightly stained glass glint and sparkle in the white sea-cast sunlight. Choir music drifts languidly from the highest minarets. Men and women in gorgeous silk robes glide decorously along the raised esplanades and balconies. For the masked nobles of Aku, life is one long round of banquets and masked balls. 
Not so for the poor. The city is built right across the top of a narrow river canyon hundreds of feet high. The rich live in the city proper, the better-off merchants have mansions on the upper ledges of the canyon walls, and the slums of the poor cluster far down below. There they must endure the daily shower of sewage and refuse from above but, even so, many covet the sites directly under the city. This is because the nobles sometimes toss scraps of meat or half-eaten fruits from the balconies, or even whimsically drop coins off the marble balustrades; a desperate man can always dream of a windfall from on high. 
Guards stand on duty beside the ramps leading to the noble palaces, as stiff and unmoving as figures of cast iron. These men are members of the Expunger caste. Their tunics are cut away leaving the right arms bare from the shoulder down, the skin patterned with a black filigree of tattoos swirling down the forearm and hand towards the long, iron-hard fingernails with which they can slay a foe with a single cobra-like stab. 
On the terraces of the canyon wall just below you are the warehouses and homes of the merchant class. A few shrubs are the only decorative touch to relieve the grey tedium of those narrow peak-roofed dwellings. Aku is the capital of Uttaku. A great palace, resting on massive buttresses, sits above the city like a spider. In the palace lives the Faceless King and the nobles of the Court of Hidden Faces. You ask a passerby about the people of Uttaku. He tell you to go to an inn, where your questions will be answered.  
The homes of the merchants are safely clear of the sewage outlets in the underside of the city, although a strong wind can sometimes carry an unpleasant whiff. In front of them runs a paved promenade where heavily laden ox-carts trundle day and night. From the edge of the promenade you can get a dizzying view of the harbour far below. Strains of delicate harpsichord music waft from the leafy terraces of the city suspended over the chasm. 
A merchant pauses beside you and half closes his eyes, smiling serenely. For an instant you think he is also enjoying the music, but then he hawks and spits over the side. You see the gobbet of phlegm swoop down to catch a slum-dweller where he squats in front of his shack a hundred feet further down the cliff. 
‘A-ha-ha!’ crows the merchant. ‘See that? The stupid dozer didn’t expect that, did he?’  
Delightful people, the Uttakin. Their motto seems to be: no matter where you are in life's heap, always take time to dollop dirt on the guy below you.

33 comments:

  1. Great - I can't wait to add it to the collection!

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  2. Me too. I was just wondering, in this new book, is the Uttakin Court Quests and High King's Event are now mutually exclusive. I mean, it just does not make sense to be honest. Both side will consider you as traitor after all. Well, Uttakia at least.

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  3. That's really a question for Jamie to answer, but until he chips in I'll put forward my two cents, which is that maybe you can operate as a double agent. The High King and the court of Uttaku may not be aware of who is working for the other side, after all. If you choose to be an honourable character, of course, you'll let your heart lead you and serve only one side.

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  4. Playing both sides against each other? That would be worth a fistful of shards.

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  5. Yes! Yes! Yes! Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeees! You're great! I've been waiting for the book for so long, it's great to see this news, thank you!

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  6. Just to add a little question: only some months ago it seemed very difficult to see this new step of the print project, what's changed that convinced Fabled Lands Publishing to take this route again? Just my curiosity. :)

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    1. Actually that's an interesting point, so I'm glad to have an excuse to answer it. This time we decided to try using Createspace (Amazon's own POD company) instead of our regular printer.

      It's much easier to set up files on Createspace, which shaves a couple of weeks off the whole set-up process - though I still found myself working until the early hours of the morning checking every link and formatting each section to make sure options didn't get split over a page break. Not fun!

      Anyway, that meant it was quicker to set up FL5 for printing and should allow me time to fit in FL6 before Christmas too. The one downside is that Createspace is more expensive, so FL5 will have to be priced a dollar more than the first four books. There was nothing we could do about that - if I'd kept the old price, we'd have been making a loss per sale.

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    2. Heck, you know I will buy printed books 5 & 6 for old time's sake and to complete the new collection (I left my old copies of all 6 books to some (at the time) young kids I knew in a township in South Africa - with a set of dice and pencils (I hope they enjoyed it as much as I did), so I am happy to have them all over again (and how knows, maybe pass these on to some kids one day!

      I will also buy any and all ipad/kindle versions (but you know my beef with the 12 items & class restrictions rules!!! - which is my main point of contention with the Fabled Lands PC app!), shame the Megara ones won't continue as they were pretty fun!

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  7. Keep em coming! This is some great news.

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    1. Indeed, I hope that *all* of our other gamebooks will come back into print (as well as digital form) as part of our new venture with a publisher whose name I will divulge very soon. So that's about 35 titles right there. Add to that at least a half-dozen all-new standalone gamebooks that Jamie and I will be writing if the venture proves a success, starting with that one I called Undeadwood (not the real title!) which is due next spring.

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    2. Does that mean that the current POD versions of Fabled Lands 5+6 are kind of temporary only, and will be republished as normal, "pre-printed" books o with that new publisher?

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  8. Thank you for the clarification and for all these wonderful news. A dollar more is nothing compared to the possibility to have the book on my shelf! And many other "friends" will come, as it seems, both new and old...

    I'll try to advertise this news on the Italian gamebooks sites, too, be sure that many others will hear the voice of the Fabled Lands! :)

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  9. Uttakin adventures and High King - should they be mutually exclusive? I can't really remember exactly how it went, but I do remember considering that. But to be honest, I really enjoyed the whole Uttakin thing and the High King thing, I didn't want the reader not to read and enjoy them both as well! Also, there's the idea that you're a wandering adventuring type, so perhaps they needn't be mutually exclusive, plus neither side would necessarily know about the other, and then again, it is also left up to the player to role play if he wishes, so you can refuse to work for whoever, if you like. I know that is hard if it isn't recognized by the 'world/GM' type of thing though. However, I think you might run into High King problems if you have blue skin? Or maybe not... a while ago when I wrote it.

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    1. I agree. Fabled Lands doesn't have any nonsense like "alignment" - it's up to the player if they want to stay true to one side or play the field. Just like in real role-playing (ie not D&D!).

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  10. Excellent news! My pre-order/order will be placed the moment Amazon will allow it.

    That said, I still prefer print. I can't make notes in the margins on my eReader. ;-)

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  11. And indeed, Angst, it will be print!

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  12. Great news, Dave!
    For sure, an extra dollar will not stop fans from buying the books. Like Kingfede, I'll post this news on the swiss gamebook sites, hoping it will gather some extra attention.
    Quick question regarding your venture: how likely a deal to complete the series seems possible ? (more or less like MJW secured the publication of Destiny Quest 3 even before the book 2 went on sale). Will it solely depend on the sales of the reprints? Again, lots of success to you.
    Steve, Geneva

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    1. The reprints aren't the only factor determining whether we can complete the series, Steve. The sales of the digital versions from Spirit Entrrtainment will also be important. Overall, as long as each book can be shown to be profitable across all platforms, we can raise the money to do Books 7-12. We won't know that until the Spirit editions go on sale in a few months - announcement soon.

      If we do them, to speed the process up, Jamie and I are thinking of hiring a small team of gamebook authors. These are all well-known, experienced guys with plenty of knowledge of the FL world. That way, if the rest of the series does go ahead, it won't take years to complete.

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  13. I think we'd all prefer to them to be authored by you guys, rather than a "Dave and Jamie present" fighting fantasy style.

    But hey if you did want to outsource you would definitely want to take a look at the fan written book 9. I have only browsed through it but it seems impressive!

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    1. Rest assured, Drake, we wouldn't be as hands-off as Ian and Steve were with the FF series. My thinking is more that Jamie and I would lay out all the main locations, characters and plotlines, along with the basic structure of each book, then we'd get a bunch of gamebook authors to help us flesh that out.

      Thinking up the ideas takes about 20% of the time, the other 80% is turning it into a flowchart and writing each option, and it's with the latter stage that we could use some help. Kind of how Peter Molyneux doesn't do his own coding these days.

      As six more books would comprise about 4500 sections, and we have other projects that we have to work on too (such as the next Dirk Lloyd book) this looks like the best way to get it all done. In the last 16 years, Jamie and I have learnt a lot about teamwork from our time in videogame development, so I'm confident we could make it work without sacrificing quality.

      Of course, we can't hire that team till we see if we're making enough money to actually pay them...

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    2. The kickstarter idea mentioned a while back could really work for the missing Fabled Lands books, and would be worth investigating. Those books are probably already sitting on a shelf in the Great Library of the Dreamlands...

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  14. I'm tempted. If we raised $130,000 we could complete the other six books *and* start work on the MMO :-) But the guy who raised funding for his Trial of the Clones gamebook, although having no experience in writing gamebooks, apparently is pretty famous online as a cartoonist - which surely helped. Jamie and I are thinking that maybe we could reach out to subscribers in the FL community more directly via the Yahoo group.

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    1. Just one point to add to the Kickstarter debate... if FL readers want to help make the existing books a success, and thus improve the chances of the series continuing, there's no better way than to go and put a review up on Amazon.

      FL1 has a dozen reviews - which is great, but the books would have a much better chance of getting onto Amazon's search recommendations if we had more reviews. Imagine if everybody who has enjoyed the FL series went and put a review - we'd have thousands! And a review needn't be an essay, it can just be a star rating and a sentence or two. So if you've been thinking of doing that and never got around to it - now would be a good time.

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  15. I think you might need more than $120k to start an MMO! EA spent $500M on The Old Republic and appears to have lost a fair bit of money on that venture!! It seems to be a hazardous model these days

    On the other hand I think a Fabled Lands boardgame (along the lines of the Tales of Arabian Nights game) could be a wonderful way to bring the world and books to another medium (and bring in new fans for the series)

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  16. You're right. Even a lottery win wouldn't fund an MMO (although I seriously doubt that EA really spent as much as half a billion!). Everything starts with the design, and we could at least get going on that.

    James Wallis did design a Fabled Lands boardgame. Jamie has the prototype sitting around somewhere. But nothing could outdo Eric Goldberg's classic, which was (of course) the major inspiration for FL in the first place. Highly recommended:
    http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/34119/tales-of-the-arabian-nights

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  17. Printed copies rock! Excellent news.

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  18. Sorry to comment on an older post, but I've only just noticed your mention of a small chunk of book 5 being ghosted by Tim Harford.

    I don't know much about the writing industry, but I'm curious - what was the reason for that? Was it purely down to time/deadline considerations, as discussed in another comment above?

    To me, "ghosting" always implies tacky celebrity autobiographies written on behalf of celebrities who can't write, but that's probably an extremely old-fashioned and erroneous viewpoint :-)

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    1. It was deadline pressure, Michael. Ghosting happens more than you might think (James Patterson doesn't actually write a half-dozen books a year in person) and it's usually associated with hack work, but perhaps unfairly. My wife ghosted a couple of series of adventure novels for a celebrity, and the celebrity in question was certainly no lightweight - he helped come up with the plots and contributed plenty of brilliant story ideas. It just happens that while my wife was doing her English degree, he was learning to fire an L96.

      Since that time, of course, Tim has become something of a celebrity himself. In fact, maybe we should have put his name on the cover alongside Jamie's.

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    2. Thanks Dave, that's interesting and puts it into perspective. Also, your reply prompted me to go and look up what an L96 was, so was educational, too! :-)

      On the same subject, I was initially a bit dismayed by your suggested plan of using other gamebook authors to write large chunks of books 7-12. On reflection though, I'd trust you guys enough to know that you'd ensure the writing style remained consistent throughout the series.

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    3. That's a point well worth making, Michael, as when I talk about using teams of writers I certainly don't think that has to mean a sacrifice of quality. Joss Whedon usually only wrote one or two episodes of Buffy per season, but it was hard to spot the join because he was a good show-runner and he picked top talent to work with like Jane Espenson.

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