The Island Economy

The latest post on Uncaring Cosmos ruminates about how the “British Old School” style may have arisen out of the RPG scene in the UK being largely curated by Games Workshop – global distribution not having reached the point where the RPG culture in the Anglosphere has become more homogenised more recently. (It goes without saying, of course, that the development of RPGs in non-English speaking markets has tended to be based largely on who’s managed to make it big with licensed translations or homebrewed games; Die Schwarze Auge is, as I understand it, the biggest game in Germany because its designers moved first before D&D got a lock on the market, most Swedish RPGs of a certain vintage draw heavily on BRP because the original Drachar och Demoner was largely an unauthorised RuneQuest translation, and apparently in Japan Call of Cthulhu is absolutely huge, especially among women.)

I think there’s definitely something to the idea of local gatekeepers shaping local gaming scenes. It’s particularly interesting how Games Workshop, by virtue of being a) the primary importer of American RPGs into the UK and b) by far the largest specialist homegrown producer of RPGs got to have as much influence as it did as a gatekeeper. (Even D&D and Traveller got their start in the UK by being brought over by Games Workshop, after all.)

That said, I would argue that it wasn’t the sole gatekeeper, or necessarily even the largest – just the only one which was a specialist in RPGs and other hobby games. I’d say that the biggest companies dealing in RPGs in the UK in the 1980s would have actually been Puffin and Corgi and their various competitors – book publishers whose main bread and butter wasn’t in the RPG field, but who put out game material as a notable and profitable sideline. Puffin not only gave us Fighting Fantasy but also the original Maelstrom, whilst Corgi imported Tunnels & Trolls (and gave us those gorgeous Josh Kirby reimaginings of the various book covers) and produced Dragon Warriors.

Of course, all of that was in the context of the gamebook craze, with the full-blooded RPGs in question usually being associated with a gamebook line – Fighting Fantasy obviously had the gamebooks come first before the basic and Advanced RPG versions came out, Tunnels & Trolls began as an RPG before Flying Buffalo hit on the notion of combining Choose Your Own Adventure-style gamebooks with RPG mechanics, even Maelstrom needed to incorporate a self-contained solo adventure to slip onto Puffin’s schedule. (In this respect, I think Dragon Warriors was a bit of an outlier.) And the gamebook craze in the UK was driven by Fighting Fantasy, which Jackson and Livingstone openly admit was concocted as a gateway drug to RPGs in general. So arguably every substantial player in the market in the UK was dancing to Games Workshop’s tune – if you were jumping on the bandwagon, odds were you were trying to emulate the success of Games Workshop or Fighting Fantasy.

Come to think of it, I think Games Workshop must have established a virtual monopoly fairly early on in the British industry in terms of being a specialist RPG publisher (as opposed to a generalist publisher dipping their toes into RPGs), because whilst I am aware of some small press RPGs from the UK from this era, I can’t think of any more substantial UK companies putting out RPG material on a professional basis (as opposed to a small press hobbyist basis) aside from TSR’s short-lived UK branch until Games Workshop made the decision to cease publishing and importing RPGs.

I guess beforehand it made most sense, if you were a UK-based wannabe RPG designer, to submit material to White Dwarf and otherwise look to working with Games Workshop. Once they walked away to focus exclusively on their wargames and boardgames, most people interested in RPG design in the UK stopped submitting their stuff to White Dwarf and decided to develop their own IPs instead. Not only did you have the rise of Hogshead in the mid-1990s as a result of this, but a bit before that you had a range of new publishers arising in the UK, often associated with an idiosyncratic game line which felt like it a) took a bit of influence from Games Workshop’s grimdark stylings and b) could well have been devised as an “in-house” setting to use material which perhaps was developed for one of Games Workshop’s lines; I’m thinking specifically here of games like SLA Industries and Tales of Gargentihr.

Even then, Hogshead largely carried the publishing torch in the UK by itself for much of the 1990s; with international distribution networks being better-developed and the Hot New Thing in RPGs being the decidedly US-centric early versions of Vampire: the Masquerade and its siblings, perhaps that’s no surprise. It feels like only comparatively recently that there’s actually been multiple UK RPG publishers active at the same time of significant size, between Cubicle 7, Mongoose, Chronicle City and Modiphius (and Mongoose is looking poorly these days). I guess the reason that Hogshead never quite managed to exert the same level of scene-shaping cultural influence over the UK RPG community as Games Workshop did is because of precisely the globalisation factors that Uncaring Cosmos outlines.

Alone Against the Book-Keeping

Alone Against the Dark is a solo adventure for Call of Cthulhu – a valiant attempt to cram a globe-trotting campaign on the scale of Masks of Nyarlathotep into a thin gamebook which almost, but not quite, succeeds.

The gamebook deploys several clever innovations to add useful options in play without needlessly wasting paragraphs – like the scope to telephone places or the use of a single paragraph to describe the process of using medical facilities, whether the place in question is a world-class hospital or a lonely ship’s medical bay. The cleverest thing about it, however, is the way it incorporates an honest-to-good method of providing multiple “lives” in a gamebook adventure. Though you only play one character at a time, when your character dies that isn’t the end of the adventure – you instead go to the starting paragraph of the next pregenerated character, who it is assumed has been largely filled in on what has been going on by regular telegram and, with the flow of telegrams having stopped for some days, is prompted to spring into action themselves.

The pregens themselves have 150 unspent skill points each, so you can personalise them as you see fit, though they each have their specialties – you begin with an aged academic and end with a tough muscley sailor lad – presumably because the later in the investigation it is, the more you’re going to need to resort to violence. It’s only a full-fledged “game over, start again” situation if your fourth PC (the Tom of Finland pinup) dies. In principle, it’s possible to finish the investigation with your starting character still alive, though you’d need to be both clever and lucky to manage it.

The major downside of the adventure is the painstaking timekeeping it demands; it literally requires you to account for every single hour of every day, including 8 hours for sleep and 2 hours for eating, each meal hour suitably separated from the other one. Though there’s some important plot stuff which does hinge on timing, equally I feel like this level of bookkeeping and fiddling about amounts to overkill – far, far too much effort on the part of the player for the payoff it gives. It feels like Alone Against the Dark might be better off were it adapted to Cthulhu Chronicles as a result; then your mobile could handle the bookkeeping and as a player you wouldn’t spend half the playing time ticking off hours and planning meals.

Non-Euclidian Training Wheels

Chaosium’s new Starter Set for Call of Cthulhu, whilst attractively presented, doesn’t seem to have required an awful amount of work in terms of generating raw text. The individual components seem to have been drawn together from a range of existing products Chaosium had to hand, to an extent where those who already have an extensive Call of Cthulhu collection probably already own a lot of it. That said, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts – and, of course, anyone who already has an extensive Call of Cthulhu collection doesn’t need the Starter Set in the first place.

Along with a set of dice, some pregenerated player characters and some blank character sheets, and nice printouts of the player handouts for, the box comes with three handsome booklets. The first offers a brief introduction to the concept of the game and then follows the example of the classic “Red Box” Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set by Frank Mentzer by using a solo adventure to teach the basic concepts of the system. Specifically, the solo adventure in question is Alone Against the Flames, which is actually fairly substantial as far as such things go and is probably as decent an introduction to the system as could be offered in this format.

Kickstopper: Comics Where YOU Are the Hero!

This article was previously published on Ferretbrain; due to the imminent closure of that site, I’m moving it over here so that it can remain available.

Illustrations have often been a feature of gamebooks – the artwork in Fighting Fantasy books constitutes some of the most aesthetically interesting fantasy art of the era, particularly given the number of pieces which depict a first person viewpoint. But just how much can you incorporate illustration into a gamebook? Graphic Novel Adventures seeks to find out…

Usual Note On Methodology

Just in case this is the first Kickstopper article you’ve read, there’s a few things I should establish first. As always, different backers on a Kickstarter will often have very different experiences and I make no guarantee that my experience with this Kickstarter is representative of everyone else’s. In particular, I’m only able to review these things based on the tier I actually backed at, and I can’t review rewards I didn’t actually receive.

The format of a Kickstopper goes like this: first, I talk about the crowdfunding campaign period itself, then I note what level I backed at and give the lowdown on how the actual delivery process went. Then, I review what I’ve received as a result of the Kickstarter and see if I like what my money has enabled. Lots of Kickstarters present a list of backers as part of the final product; where this is the case, the “Name, DNA and Fingerprints” section notes whether I’m embarrassed by my association with the product.

Towards the end of the review, I’ll be giving a judgement based on my personal rating system for Kickstarters. Higher means that I wish I’d bid at a higher reward level, a sign that I loved more or less everything I got from the campaign and regret not getting more stuff. Lower means that whilst I did get stuff that I liked out of the campaign, I would have probably been satisfied with one of the lower reward levels. Just Right means I feel that I backed at just the right level to get everything I wanted, whilst Just Wrong means that I regret being entangled in this mess and wish I’d never backed the project in the first place. After that, I give my judgement on whether I’d back another project run by the same parties involved, and give final thoughts on the whole deal.

The Reading Canary: Fighting Fantasy (Part 5)

This article was previously published on Ferretbrain; due to the imminent closure of that site, I’m moving it over here so that it can remain available.

Previously In Fighting Fantasy

Having kicked the series off, Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone spent some times on separate projects, respectively experimenting with the wonder that is Sorcery! and writing a series of vanilla adventures for the core series. Then they began incorporating more gamebooks by other authors.

Ian Livingstone vs. Andrew Chapman: Who’s Better?

The incorporation of additional authors into the series was a simple factor of demand for new adventures far outstripping what Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone alone were able to produce, combined with a deliberate strategy to shove their competitors out of the market. The plan was to get at least one new gamebook into shops each month; the idea was that the readership’s pocket money wouldn’t stretch to buying many more gamebooks than that, and given the choice most readers would opt for the well-regarded Fighting Fantasy brand over the various imitators on the market.

By this point, said imitators were thick on the ground and included some stiff competition. In particular, they included the well-regarded Lone Wolf series by Joe Dever – who ironically had originally begun planning the book as a Fighting Fantasy adventure before jumping ship from Games Workshop and making his own deal with a publisher. In this context I can’t help but take a second look at the way the Fighting Fantasy books by third party authors were presented; though the genuine authorship of each book was acknowledged on the interior title page, the authors’ names would be kept off the front covers, which instead would read “Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone Present” – with the “present”, in decidedly smaller text, the only oblique clue that this was not in fact Jackson and Livingstone’s own work. In this way, Jackson and Livingstone’s names garnered far more brand recognition than any of the third-party contributors to the series, and I have to wonder whether part of the reason for this was to make it less likely that any of the writers in question would be able to garner enough recognition to helm their own breakaway series – not that that didn’t happen anyway.

1985 was the first full year in which the one-a-month plan was in effect, and whilst the target wasn’t quite met, Puffin did manage to get a decent brace of books out, including the four I’m reviewing here. This set is particularly interesting because two of them are written by Ian Livingstone himself, and two of them are written by Andrew Chapman, whose own Space Assassin was the first release of 1985. Moreover, each author this time contributes one book set in the Fighting Fantasy world itself – which by this point was becoming the default setting for all fantasy-genre Fighting Fantasy gamebooks – and one SF book (post-apocalyptic stuff for Ian, space opera for Chapman). This is makes these the ideal set to pick for a comparison between the two. Could the upstart Chapman beat the series founder at his own game?

Kickstopper: The Archaeology of Firetop Mountain

This article was previously published on Ferretbrain; due to the imminent closure of that site, I’m moving it over here so that it can remain available.

Last time, I talked about how Kickstarter seems to have been a particular boon to point and click adventures. Another genre of game that has thrived on there, as witnessed by To Be Or Not To Be, is the humble gamebook. I suspect it’s for similar reasons – firstly, you have an audience reared on the medium in question now old enough to put money down on a Kickstarter (conceivably a lot of money if you are looking at the higher tiers). Secondly, you have a product which is based on a sufficiently tried and tested model that you can set a budget with a bit more certainty than a game based on experimental or unfamiliar game mechanics or technology. Thirdly, the genre is niche enough that it’s extraordinarily beneficial to be able to demonstrate sufficient demand ahead of time.

Tabletop RPG products have also thrived on Kickstarter for similar reasons, and recently I covered Beyond the Pit for the Advanced Fighting Fantasy system. Based on this, you might suppose it’s only a matter of time before Kickstarter was used not just to produce gamebooks and Fighting Fantasy-related products, but to produce actual new Fighting Fantasy books. That… hasn’t happened yet. And the reason I know it hasn’t happened yet is because of You Are the Hero, an expansive history of the Fighting Fantasy franchise by Jonathan Green whose publication was funded through Kickstarter.

Usual Notes On Methodology

As always, different backers on a Kickstarter will often have very different experiences and I make no guarantee that my experience with this Kickstarter is representative of everyone else’s. In particular, I’m only able to review these things based on the tier I actually backed at and can’t review rewards I didn’t actually receive.

At the end of the review, I’ll be giving a judgement based on my personal rating system for Kickstarters. Higher means that I wish I’d bid at a higher reward level, a sign that I loved more or less everything I got from the campaign and regret not getting more stuff. Lower means that whilst I did get stuff that I liked out of the campaign, I would have probably been satisfied with one of the lower reward levels. Just Right means I feel that I backed at just the right level to get everything I wanted, whilst Just Wrong means that I wish I’d never backed the project in the first place.

The Campaign

Jonathan Green isn’t an unknown figure to the Fighting Fantasy fanbase by any stretch of the imagination. As well as being an established author in his own right, he’s also a gamebook veteran, being the author of several of the final mid-1990s entries in the original Puffin line as well as almost all of the new Fighting Fantasy books published since Wizard Books revived the series. (He’s also responsible for the Imperial Fists-themed Warhammer 40,000 gamebook I reviewed a while back.) Being a familiar face was doubtless helpful to the project – both in terms of convincing people to fund the project and in terms of getting access to Steve Jackson, Ian Livingstone, and the various editors, writers, artists, publishers, fans and other significant individuals he would interview in the process of producing the book.

The project grew out of a retrospective article that Green had written for SFX magazine on Fighting Fantasy; in the course of producing it, Green had realised that he’d only scratched the surface with his original article, and the full story of the series would benefit from a book-length treatment. The appetite for a certain level of Fighting Fantasy nostalgia had already been demonstrated by a different, failed Kickstarter – Turn to 400, an attempt to product a full-length documentary film on the history of the series. Although Turn to 400 brought in £15,000 worth of pledges, this fell short of the ambitious £40,000 target set for the budget, which left Turn to 400 in stasis and a bunch of backers with some £15,000 still in their pocket ready for the right Fighting Fantasy history project to come along.

I’m not saying that Green deliberately set the funding target for You Are the Hero on that basis – if you were going to do something like that you’d go for a slightly lower level to account for the backers you didn’t capture – but I’m sure the Turn to 400 Kickstarter helped prime the ground for You Are the Hero, which eventually wrapped up its campaign with over £21,000 of pledges.

What Level I Backed At

CYCLOPS – As Troll, but your name will appear in the acknowledgements section of the book, as a thank you for helping make this project happen.

For reference, Troll level was as follows:

TROLL – You will receive one limited edition copy of YOU ARE THE HERO. (You may order additional copies of the book at £25 per book. P&P will have to be paid separately on all books at a rate of £5 for the UK, £9 for Europe, and £16 for Rest of the World, per book.)

The Delivery Process

The estimated release date for You Are the Hero was December 2013, and the eventual release took place in early September 2014, so that’s a delay of some 8-9 months, which isn’t superb but at the same time isn’t unexceptional as far as Kickstarter projects go. I personally didn’t find the delay especially frustrating, since Green did a good job of keeping up a steady trickle of updates to keep everyone in the loop about delays – and, most importantly, providing credible-sounding updated deadlines, which is more reassuring than saying “Well, we’ll deliver the book at some point, but we have no idea when that will be”.

On top of that, Green went above and beyond in terms of providing extra value to the backers; whilst the £23,000 stretch goal which would have guaranteed that all copies of You Are the Hero put out through the Kickstarter campaign were hardcovers wasn’t reached, able budgeting meant that by the end of the process there was enough funds to provide this upgrade anyway, meaning that Kickstarter backers ended up with a sturdier and somewhat more handsome version of the book than those who waited to pick it up until after the campaign was done.

The offical release of the book took place at Fighting Fantasy Fest, the first convention dedicated solely to the franchise. A small but well-attended affair, it included a range of talks, guest appearances, an art gallery which included some fascinating pieces like original notes from the design process of classic gamebooks, and of course the launch of You Are the Hero itself. Backers were welcome to come to the convention and pick up their copies directly. Whilst I didn’t stay there for very long – it really was a lovely sunny day outside, and there were men wearing fedoras and t-shirts based on 4Chan memes unironically inside – it was a fun event to pop into for a dyed-in-the-wool fan like myself, plus it meant my copy of the book was saved from the stresses and strains of the postal system.

Apparently I made the right call; based on subsequent backer updates, it appears that some people (particularly overseas) had issues with their delivery of the book taking an irritatingly long time, and some were especially annoyed by the fact that they ended up getting their copies of the book after it was available for sale to the general public. Although Kickstarter is not just some pre-ordering service, and there’s often good reasons why Kickstarted products and conventionally pre-ordered products end up released to the general public before Backers and preorderers get their copies, I entirely understand why that might bug people. Particularly when the end product you get is no different from the product that ends up in shop shelves (which isn’t quite the case here), it feels utterly pointless to pre-order a book if it turns out you could have got it faster and cheaper just by buying it conventionally; on top of that, because Kickstarter backers provide the funds that make a product possible in the first place, there’s some justification to the idea that the project creators’ first loyalty should be to them instead of the broader audience.

Reviewing the Swag

So, how is the book itself? Tall, fat, and beautiful would be the three adjectives I’d primarily use for it. I suspect that, as with Beyond the Pit, a generous portion of the budget was reserved for paying the various Fighting Fantasy artists for the use of their artwork, because like any good coffee table book this volume is absolutely crammed with pictures. One of the things which really made Fighting Fantasy stand out from the crowd for me was the amazing artwork, which over time developed this really nice aesthetic for the series – proving that you can do dark fantasy which doesn’t resort into the drab, sad realism of a lot of grimdark material whilst at the same time being more varied and surreal (but no less ornate and baroque) than the house style used for Warhammer these days. It turns out I’m not alone in my appreciation of the artwork of the series, because the various artists profiled in the book get just as much attention as the gamebook authors (indeed, particularly noteworthy artists get more attention than some of the more minor writers), and the full-page presentations of some of the illustrations are especially nice. (On top of that, Green was even able to commission some brand-new artwork for the book, such as the gorgeous cover you see to the right there.)

As far as the actual text goes, it’s a history of Fighting Fantasy written by a friendly insider (who at points has to write about himself in the thrid person) and pitched more as a celebration of the franchise than a formal study, so if you’re after dry, academic rigour or a muck-raking investigation into the hidden scandals of the 80s gaming scene in the UK you are well and truly in the wrong place here. On the other hand, if you want a really exhaustive look at the franchise, it does a pretty good job: every book in the core series is profiled, as is just about every spin-off product released in conjunction with the series, and the book additionally offers a look at Jackson and Livingstone’s post-Fighting Fantasy activities and a look at current developments and potential future directions for the franchise.

Green has interviewed a sufficiently wide variety of sources that a broad picture of the franchise’s history is built up, and he has dug deeply enough that he is able to provide a range of facts that even hardcore fans will be unfamiliar with. I was particularly struck by the revelation of Puffin’s mid-1990s plan to revamp the series by reducing each book from 400 paragraphs to 300 paragraphs on the assumption that this would make it appeal to a younger audience – a plan which would have included revising all the existing books to take out 100 paragraphs of material. When you hear that they were contemplating acts of vandalism like that, you start feeling glad that Puffin’s custodianship of the series ended when it did.

The overview of the current state of the series is particularly interesting, because it’s clear that there’s lots of people interested in doing something with the IP but not much in the way of cohesive and unified effort drawing these plans together. For instance, multiple different companies are working on smartphone adaptations of classic Fighting Fantasy books, with a completely different set of developers handling Sorcery!, and whilst multiple people seem interested in putting together a Fighting Fantasy movie, Jackson and Livingstone seem to have been happy to let individual projects percolate on their own. The impression I got from these final chapters is that, now that they own the rights to the series, Jackson and Livingstone seem to be giving adaptation rights to folk who happen to catch their eye without necessarily developing a cohesive plan for the ongoing development and promotion of the franchise. Whilst this “let a thousand flowers bloom” approach might have the advantage of insulating Jackson and Livingstone from the consequences of any one project going tits-up, at the same time I do wonder whether this diffusion of effort results in inconsistency within the market.

I also can’t help but feel that there must be some way to make producing new Fighting Fantasy adventures a profitable concern – whether this takes the form of new hardcopies or eBook adaptations of the format – rather than relying on constant rehashes and rereleases of old material. The two Wizard Books reprint series seemed to fade away over time due to sales petering out, and whilst part of me suspects the rather drab cover art they were lumbered with might be a culprit there, I do wonder whether this might be a problem of the wrong business model being adopted rather than the books being intrinsically unmarketable to modern kids, with too much reliance on rehashing old books that are amply available through second hand sources and not enough in the way of new releases coming out.

As Livingstone himself notes in these pages, the French translations of the gamebooks by Gallimard sell so consistently well that they’ve never gone out of print, so there’s clearly an audience for this stuff out there that can support ongoing publication even if sales aren’t of the chart-smashing level they enjoyed in the 1980s. Whilst there’s doubtless a certain amount of money to be made in making the expansive back catalogue available (whether in hardcopy or adapted eBook format), I’m convinced there’s a place for more new adventures to add to the legacy and to appeal to new audiences – I simply can’t believe the market can’t sustain more than the occasional anniversary release by Jackson or Livingstone.

If only there were some sort of platform people could use to set up and promote financially risky propositions in order to simultaneously gauge public interest and raise funds to support the production process – some means to allow creators to reach out directly to their audience and ask them to help kickstart a project. Unfortunately, no such website exists, otherwise I would be loudly advocating using it to fund the release of new, original releases.

Name, DNA, and Fingerprints

Although having your name credited on a product is a common Kickstarter reward, I haven’t yet done a Kickstopper review of a product where I backed at a level that would deliver that reward. At last I have, so I can inaugurate this new section (name derived from this Jerkcity strip), where I get to note a) whether my name was included correctly and b) whether I’m embarrassed in retrospect to have my name associated with the project.

In this case, my name was correctly provided at the backing level I provided. Do I think it was worth the extra £5 to upgrate to Cyclops from Troll, given that this is literally the only benefit I got from that? Frankly, yes. Fighting Fantasy books were a big part of my childhood, and it feels good to be a named and credited contributor to this new addendum to the franchise even though I didn’t really make any effort that Troll-level backers didn’t. £5 is cheap enough that I think it’s a small price to pay to avoid the buyer’s remorse of backing at Troll-level and then later on thinking “Man, but I could have had my name on this.”

Higher, Lower, Just Right or Just Wrong?

Based on the above, I would say my level of backing here was Just Right.

Would Back Again?

This Kickstarter does appear to have been a learning experience for Green, with the combination of shipping issues and project delays in particular being a classic Kickstarter pitfall. Still, he has dealt with all of these problems with good grace and was able to deliver a product that was even better than originally budgeted for to the backers. I’d certainly give due consideration to any subsequent Kickstarter campaign he ran. Would I back another crowdfunding hullaballoo that included Green’s fresh and tasty management and moderation if the subject of the project were the making of some other Fighting Fantasy product? Probably, depending on what specific concept the project revolved around, but I admit I can’t for the moment think what else Kickstarter might contribute to the franchise.

Kickstopper: Holy Crap Readers, This Book Is Already Awesome

This article was previously published on Ferretbrain; due to the imminent closure of that site, I’m moving it over here so that it can remain available.

In my debut Kickstopper article I reviewed the Shadowrun: Returns project and decided that, even though I would have probably been happy backing at a lower level, nonetheless I was very pleased with the final product and was glad to be involved in the process. Hot on the heels of that, Ryan North successfully completed his To Be Or Not To Be Kickstarter, heralding another first for Kickstopper – the first article with physical goods involved. Will my 100% “I’m glad I did this” success rate continue, or will buyer’s remorse creep into play? Let’s find out!

Reminder On Methodology

Just a quick reminder that, due to the nature of Kickstarters, I can only review the reward tier I happened to pick, and I can’t comment on whether or not I find rewards I haven’t actually received to be worth the money I didn’t spend on them.